This was a bit of slow starter for me but then all of a sudden I found myself very, very involved in the story and the characters.

All the ways that human beings would deal or would not deal with the sudden disappearance of millions of people.

Some of the endings felt a bit pat and perfect, but some of them were also so open ended and full of possibilities that it all balanced out. Plus, once in a great while, it's nice to have a pat ending or two. :) ( )

This book started at 5 stars but ended at 2 stars… loved the premise and the beginning but the ending gave me nothing ( )

The Rapture. I'm sure you've heard of it. It's the belief held by most Christians that, at the end times, the faithful will be lifted up to heaven, disappearing from the earth, leaving the unfaithful behind. But what if the Rapture actually occurred, but it wasn't really the Rapture?

This is the question posed by Tom Perrotta in The Leftovers. In the novel, a Rapture-like event occurs, where millions of people around the world simply vanish. Except that this Rapture, instead of resulting in the disappearance of the Christian faithful, appears to be random. People from all walks of life, and from all faiths disappeared. In the aftermath of the Sudden Departure, as it's referred to, society tries to pick up and carry on with life. There's speculation as to what actually happened. Some say it was the Rapture. Others say it was a natural event, such as the planet's immune response to too many people. Whatever the explanation, it only serves as background, and the novel instead focuses on the social aftermath of the Sudden Departure, primarily focused on one family, the Garveys.

The novel starts (after the prologue) on the three year anniversary of the Sudden Departure as a parade for the Heroes' Day of Remembrance begins through the town of Mapleton. We are introduced to the characters and how each has reacted to the changed world. Kevin Garvey, the patriarch of the family, has been elected as town mayor, and does his best to continue handling business and juggle his disintegrating family. His wife, Laurie, has left him to join a nihilistic cult known as the Guilty Remnant, who believe that the world has essentially ended and people need to be reminded of the fact that nothing else now matters. Their daughter Jill, who was an eyewitness as her friend disappeared while right next to her, and has gone from being a star student to a rebellious teenager in the vein of the movie “Thirteen.” And their son, Tom, has joined a different cult known as the Church of the Holy Wayne, a cult with a charismatic leader who has recently been arrested on a large number of charges. In addition, another character, Nora, whose entire family disappeared in the Sudden Departure, becomes loosely involved with the Garveys and their story.

The Leftovers follows these characters lives for approximately six months following the third anniversary of the Sudden Departure. It's a slice-of-life novel about these characters' struggles and their changing lives during this period. And, with the exception of some minor speculation at the beginning about the nature of the event, the Sudden Departure doesn't play a big roll in the novel altogether. This novel could be about a family's struggles after any national or global tragedy. It becomes a fairly generic family struggle in the wake of these events, with the possible exception of a major cult presence.

And this is the biggest problem with The Leftovers. What makes it stand out...is that it doesn't really stand out. It could have been any disaster that causes people to search for themselves and to lose family members. The Sudden Departure itself turns out not to be that significant to the story, and the family's struggles are generic if a bit extreme. As such, The Leftovers failed to grip me, which is likely why it took me so long to finish it and the more I read, the more it felt like I was going through my own kind of struggle.

Which is a major problem. It's so generic that, at the end, I had to ask myself what the point was. Which may be the point itself. I recall that the Center for Disease Control recently issued guidelines for how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse. It wasn't serious, but their point was that most disasters call for the same type of preparation (food, water, blankets, etc.). This could be the point of the The Leftovers, that being that personal and family struggles during different disasters may change their form, but at the end are all similar.

There's a certain underlying dark humor to the novel. The language is accessible and beautiful at the same time, and the characters are most definitely believable. Some of the characters are simply average, and others you just downright doesn't like. In fact, I didn't like most of the characters. Most of them are too self-centered for me to care about what happens to them.

Ultimately, I can't give The Leftovers a recommendation. It ultimately felt too generic and near the end I found myself detesting the characters and wanting to give up on the book. There are small elements to like about the novel that prevent me from giving it a bottom rating, and maybe others will find more to like about the book than I did, but in the end, it's not for me.

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta earned 2 out of 5 stars.

Note: A free Advanced Reader's Edition of this book was sent to this reviewer by St. Martin's Press through a Goodreads First Read giveaway. This did not affect this review in any way. ( )

[a:Tom Perrotta|15907|Tom Perrotta|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1204163131p2/15907.jpg] took a chance with [b:The Leftovers|10762469|The Leftovers|Tom Perrotta|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1304134600s/10762469.jpg|15455523] (which I received through the Goodreads Firstreads program). The setting and characters are familiar (suburbia and suburbanites), but he adds a major dose of the supernatural to the mix: a Rapture-like event known as the Sudden Departure. (I'm not giving anything away here; this is all on the book jacket and in the prologue.)

The Leftovers, as the title implies, is about those who are left behind, to borrow a phrase from that other book about the Rapture. But here's the catch, many of the people whom one would expect to be included in the disappearance (i.e. practicing Christians) were among the leftovers, and many people who were not believers at all, or who led 'immoral' lives, were among the departed.

So how do normal people deal with an event of this magnitude? Many of them join cults, apparently. And many of them begin to ignore the old rules.

And this was my one problem with the book: the characters seemed too normal. It took me a long time to really identify with them.

Having said that, I did begin to identify with them and care about them, and I was surprised by how everything wrapped up. Perrotta also succeeds in introducing a certain amount of dread in the middle section of the book, which keeps you reading happily.

All in all, the story flows effortlessly, and it's enjoyable reading. I only wish Perrotta had invested more imagination in his characters and a little less in the speculative aspects of the story. In the end, this is a story about people rebuilding their lives after a devastating loss, and it's about finding something to live for when everything you believe turns out to be wrong.

Speculative fiction, done correctly, is just a different way of looking at the world we live in today, and that's the best way to read this book. We're caught in a culture divided in two: one group smugly believes they have access to Absolute Truth, and the other group lives under the burden of nihilism. Maybe the way to reconcile these two camps is to agree that there is something way bigger than us out there, something we'll never understand, but to which we owe a great measure of respect, even awe.
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While an interesting story idea, I personally found the pacing far too slow, characters dull and the religious elements overdone. As the saying goes, each to their own! ( )