Review: Love and Leftovers

Love and Leftovers, by Sarah Tregay. The GoodReads summary:

Marcie has been dragged away from home for the summer—from Idaho to a family summerhouse in New Hampshire. She’s left behind her friends, a group of freaks and geeks called the Leftovers, including her emo-rocker boyfriend, and her father.

By the time Labor Day rolls around, Marcie suspects this “summer vacation” has become permanent. She has to start at a new school, and there she leaves behind her Leftover status when a cute boy brings her breakfast and a new romance heats up. But understanding love, especially when you’ve watched your parents’ affections end, is elusive. What does it feel like, really? Can you even know it until you’ve lost it?

Love & Leftovers is a beautifully written story of one girl’s journey navigating family, friends, and love, and a compelling and sexy read that teens will gobble up whole.

This is the third verse novel that I’ve read in the space of a week, and maybe that wasn’t fair of me. I mean, this book was fine, but it definitely didn’t wow me nearly as much as The Day Before did. So I don’t know how I would’ve felt about Love and Leftovers if I had read it before my expectations for verse novels were raised so much by The Day Before.

The story did end up being more complex than I originally thought, I’ll give it that. I was expecting it to only be about Marcie moving to New Hampshire, being bitter, learning to like it, then falling in love. And all those things do happen, just not in the way I anticipated. Marcie has more issues to deal with than just not wanting to move, and she doesn’t always deal with those issues in the best ways. But I liked that, because it gave some depth to what could’ve turned out to merely be fluffy.

The thing that got to me about the book, though, was the fact that it was in verse. I LOVE verse novels, but I didn’t see any reason why this one needed to be one. I didn’t think the writing was any different than just straight fiction, so it was usually just like reading a normal book with random line breaks. Also, on the poems that were done in word art style, I just got confused because the way that they were organized didn’t really make sense at first.

Overall, it’s a cute novel but not necessarily anything special. I might have enjoyed it more if I had read it before I read the wonder that is The Day Before, but it’s too late for that now. So I’m just left feeling kinda meh about this one.

Rating: 3 / 5