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| After the Leaves Fall |
I'm not sure where this book came from or why I originally decided to read it, but it was the just the thing I needed. I just finished the fourth book in the Dark Tower series, and I needed to take a break from Roland of Gilead and read something different. Thumbing through my Kindle app, this is what I settled on. I guess the name jumped out at me because I never heard of it and had no idea what it was about.
"After the Leaves Fall" is a sweet, if somewhat heartbreaking, story of a young girl who's handed a somewhat crappy hand in life, and chronicles her efforts to deal with the cards as they come. The events of her life aren't horrific, just sad, which makes them much more relatable. Her mother walks out on her and her father when she's a kid, her father passes away when she's a teen, and while being raised by her grandmother, she deals with the same teen love and heartbreak that we all deal with. She makes bad choices, she loses her way sometimes, she dtruggles to find out who she is and what she wants. It's an age-old story that everyone is familiar with. In the end, the book gets a little preachy, when Julia learns to take her grandmother's advice and trust in God, but it's still good.
Nicole Baart is a master of young-womanly emotion. Every action and feeling by Julia is exactly how I remember feeling at her age. She over-analyzes, she thinks too much, she always assumes the worst. She's awkward and has trouble figuring out where she fits in. She falls in love too easily and ends up a broken mess each time. She's your typical teenage girl.
If you're looking for a good curl-up-on-the-couch read for a cold autumn afternoon, I recommend "After the Leaves Fall".
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