- Year first released: 2018
- ISBN of the edition I read: 9781481476560
- Publisher of the edition I read: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
- My rating (out of 5): 5
After last year's phenomenal Turtles All the Way Down (which I reviewed for you here), What I Leave Behind is the book I've been most excited about getting into. Though I've not yet reviewed any of McGhee's other books for you, two of her previous novels - All Rivers Flow to the Sea and Shadow Baby - are both incredible, five-star books that sit in a special place on my shelf. I'd even go so far as to say that Shadow Baby is one of the most well-written books I've ever read. Alison McGhee - more than other writers writing in her genre - has a downright magical way with words that somehow make them rise above their static, everyday meanings. Perhaps the best word to describe her writing is transcendent.
All of that said, What I Leave Behind certainly had big shoes to fill. The question is: did it succeed?
It did and it didn't.
Rather, it did, but in a unique way, and much differently than McGhee has done before.
The first thing to note about the writing in What I Leave Behind is that it follows a very particular pattern: all of the text only appears on the right-hand pages, and each of those pages has exactly 100 words. (And, considering that there are exactly 100 pages with writing, the math comes out to only 10,000 words - technically a short story wrapped up in novel form. But that's neither here nor there.)
I knew this fact going in to the book; it's been touted a bit in the marketing, pre-release interviews, etc. The idea appealed to me; I was interested to see how it would actually play out once I had the book in front of me.
For the first dozen or so pages, I was a bit put off by this style. It was a bit hard to separate this knowledge from the way the actual words and sentences came together. Why does Will [the protagonist] say "you know" so much? Why are there so many sentence fragments all throughout? For those first handful of pages, in all honesty, it felt like a gimmick, like McGhee was just forcefully throwing in these extra little tidbits to make sure she hit her 100-word mark for the page.
Somewhere along the way, though (thankfully not too far in to the book), something about this entire setup fell into place. There was a tempo to the book. All of those "you know's" sprinkled throughout gave Will a personality, a rhythm to his thoughts and speech. (Importantly, the book is written in the first-person point of view.) Those sentence fragments, half-thoughts, catchphrases, and repeated descriptions all came together to create a flow to Will's story.
After a couple things in Will's life suddenly spiraled out of control, he became a walker. He walks everywhere - to school, to work at the dollar store, to his friend Playa's house, around the neighborhood, to the Chinese goods market. By this walking, he develops a pattern to his life (a very common, human response to tragedy, if you've read any books on psychology). And, as we realize throughout the book, this pattern is his cadence, the normality which keeps his life grounded and together. In this way, Will is certainly one of the stronger, more realistic (and yet still optimistic) characters I've come across in young adult fiction.
It turns out the rhythm to McGhee's writing in What I Leave Behind mirrors the rhythm Will is attempting to bring into his life - a phenomenal marriage of content and form. It is exceedingly rare we find a book that pulls off this feat so well. Even without the strong characters and optimistic overtone, this marriage alone would make the book well worth reading.
Despite my hesitation in the first handful of pages, McGhee has once again proven that she is still a master wordsmith. This time around, she chose a different approach - a different way of tying all of the words and pieces together - than she's done previously, but with no less lyrical, transcendent results. I'll be just as excited to read her next work of art.
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