Customer Reviews

The Myth of You and Me: A Novel

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Leah Stewart's "The Myth of You and Me" is a touching and intimate character study of two girls who become best friends at the age of fourteen. The story is told mostly in flashback. Twenty-nine year old Cameron Wilson is a live-in aide in the home Oliver Doucet, a ninety-two year old Pulitzer Prize winning historian. One day, Cameron is startled to receive a letter from her former friend, Sonia Gray, whom she abandoned after the two had a major quarrel. Sonia is about to get married and she wants to reconcile with Cameron. Although Oliver encourages Cameron to make amends with Sonia, she decides to ignore the letter. Only after Oliver's death does Cameron decide to look Sonia up and try to make peace with her.

With delicacy and compassion, Leah Stewart examines the pain that both Cameron and Sonia suffer as they grow up. Cameron is an Air Force brat who is forced to move six times in fourteen years, and to make matters worse, her classmates taunt her for being the tallest person in her class. Sonia has a severe learning disability, and she endures repeated beatings and tongue lashings from her abusive and psychotic mother. Sonia puts up a brave front in school, but she reveals her weaknesses and insecurities to Cameron. Cameron has never been in one place long enough to get to know her peers, but with Sonia, she feels right at home. After the two girls spend their high school and college years together, it appears that their friendship will last a lifetime. Unfortunately, when they have a bitter falling out over a man, their relationship abruptly ends.

The author beautifully captures the bittersweet nature of female friendship, which can be a source of great comfort or, when things go wrong, of deep anger and hurt. Through Cameron's eyes, Leah Stewart explores the circuitous paths that a woman takes in life, the memories that never leave her, and her feelings of betrayal when someone whom she trusts breaks her heart. The writing in "The Myth of You and Me" is lyrical, romantic, and heartbreaking. Anyone who has ever been lonely, fallen in love, or regretted the loss of a close friend will be enchanted by this gem of a novel.

I am the type of person who doesn't always get around to finishing the assigned book club selection. I picked up "The Myth of You and Me" on my own and read it in one sitting. Other recently-hailed novels have failed to draw me in, but Leah Stewart's story presented an emotionally true to life tale, wrapped in the structure of an unfolding mystery, that kept me reading to find out what had happened.

The characters in "The Myth of Your and Me" are not always honest with themselves or others, but that is part of what makes the story true to life. Characters are kept apart by the unresolved gap between perception and reality. I think that each of us has a fear that it people really knew us, they wouldn't like us, and that current is present throughout the novel. Each of us has a guilty memory of a friendship lost due to mutual fault and failure to forgive. As Cameron and Sonia's friendship is revealed in facets, turned around as though viewed through a kaleidoscope, the story will provoke readers to re-examine their own personal events from a more objective viewpoint. Both characters are at fault for the end of their frienship, but perception of who has committed the greater wrong, at what price, shifts as the full story is revealed.

It's refreshing to see a novel where truly shocking behavior doesn't involve overt violence, but consists of actions born of thoughtlessness and cruelty in a moment of anger, without thought for the consequences. How much do we want to punish the ones that we love? What is the cost to ourselves? Stewart provokes tantalizing ambivalence by challenging us to forgive her characters once we really know them. Can these characters forgive one another? Can we forgive ourselves?

I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever left a friend behind or been the one left behind - it was truly touching and at times scary to me how much I could relate to parts of the story. I was looking for something light to read and I picked this up - Leah Stewart has a very straightforward and appealing writing style, so it's definitely an easy read. But more importantly, the story she tells about Cameron and Sonia and all of the other characters in their lives was so REAL that I missed them all terribly when the book ended.

The letter contained a handwriting that looked familiar to that of the recipient twenty-nine years old Cameron Wilson. It came from her former best friend Sonia Gray; they have not talked to each other in eight years. Now Sonia wants her to come to her wedding in Cambridge. Her employer and companion, nonagenarian Oliver Doucett pleads with her to go see her former friend but Cameron refuses still feeling that Sonia betrayed her.

Oliver dies, but leaves one last request of Cameron. He wants her to deliver a wedding gift from him to Sonia. Stunned Cameron realizes her two best friends were communicating. Cameron honors Oliver's last wish of her, driving from Oxford, Mississippi to Sonia's house, but she is not there. She thinks back on when they first met in Clovis, New Mexico and became best buddies and later when Sonia was seeing Will Barrett who Camazon as she was called for her height hid her love of him. As Cameron tracks down her missing friend, she finds Will who she still loved and others from her past, but wonders what will happen when she runs into the girl she loved as her sister until she committed the ultimate betrayal.

THE MYTH OF YOU AND ME is a fantastic look at friendship from the perspective of a person who felt her best friend betrayed her so she deserted her former pal. The story line follows Cameron as she tracks Sonia, but also looks back on her relationship with her beloved "sister". Readers will want to know what Oliver tried to give Sonia and Cameron, what was the betrayal and root for a happy ending with this insightful look at friendship.

Harriet Klausner

The main character of this book, Cameron, is content in her job working for Oliver, a famous historian--content to forget about the past and to avoid focusing on the future. But when Oliver suddenly dies, Cameron is forced to deal with both her past and future as she sets out on a mission to find her former best friend, Sonia, to whom she hasn't spoken for 8 years; over the course of Cameron's journey, she comes to question everything she knows about honesty, friendship, and love.

I found this book to be very enjoyable: the author successfully wove past scenes of Cameron and Sonia's friendship with Cameron's present-day efforts to track Sonia down, the characters were realistically flawed, giving the story a very "real" feel, and there was even a build-up of suspense as the inevitable reunion between Cameron and Sonia approached. I enjoyed this book very much and rate it four-and-a-half out of five stars.

I began reading this book knowing nothing about it except for the summary on the back cover and was immediately hooked after the first chapter.

Stewart's portrayal of the unrelenting strength of a close friendship between two girls from childhood to adulthood is spot on. Cameron and Sonia will forever be with me.

This is a story about the people who enter and leave your life. It was a great read. Dont miss this one.

While looking through my local library for something new to read, the cover of Leah Stewart's second novel caught my sight. I was intrigued by both the cover picture and the title of the book. As I opened the cover and read the inside jacket I couldn't wait to get home to start what I believed would be (and was!) one of the best books I'd read in quite some time.

As I began to read the story of Cameron and Sonia, I quickly realized that this book was no ordinary read. The words and language used portrayed the story of two young girls who were so much in love with each other that there lives were never the same even when they were no longer a daily part of each other's lives. As I read the story I thought of my own life growing up and the friends that I had loved and lost. I thought of the pain that both Cameron and Sonia had felt when their relationship fell apart. I thought of how lonely they must of felt in those days and weeks after they had quit speaking.

This novel is one that I would recommend to anyone who as ever had a best friend - even if they are still best friends. It touches on just how fragile a friendship can be and just how little it can take before your whole world comes crashing down around you and you feel like a hollow shell of a person instead of the vibrate and wonderful person that you were just minutes before.

The story of Sonia and Cameron begins when they are just 14. The two become inseperable and struggle together through the hard times including Sonia's struggle with numbers and her struggle with her mother - whose strong words and emotions are always with Sonia. Throughout the book we learn the story of Sonia and Cameron including their demise at a lonely gas station where Cameron leaves Sonia behind because of an ill fated mistake.

This novel is truly a wonderful and moving piece that I would recommend to anyone who has ever had that one person in their life that knows not only what they are doing but what they are thinking too!

Amazing words, superb story, touching subject. I can't rave enough about this book. It explores friendships & relationships in a way no book I've ever known has done before. Leah Stewart has the perfect method to tell this deep story and uses the most amazing words in the process.

And a big YEAH! to the 2 references to Fleetwood Mac in this book.

I can't wait to read more Leah Stewart!

Cameron Wilson has been working for the ninety-two-year-old Oliver Doucet for quite a few years. Indeed, Cameron has no real ties to anyone accept the aging literary historian. The child of wondering parents, Cameron has grown up to believe that she's never really belonged anywhere, her adolescent years defined by her relationship with her best friend, Sonia Gray.

But Cameron hasn't spoken to Sonia in eight years. Haunted by a broken heart and the remembrances of betrayal, Cameron has almost forgotten that her friend even existed. When she receives a letter from Sonia telling her that she's about to get married, and that she wants to heal their rift with an invitation to her impending nuptials, Cameron declines, unable to come to terms with the duplicity that happened all those years ago.

Oliver tells her that Cameron should try to reconnect with Sonia because she's not close to anyone, she doesn't have a beau, and she hardly ever talks to her parents. He observes, "There's a distance between you and the rest of the world." When Oliver suddenly dies, he leaves with Cameron a letter; a final plea that Cameron should deliver an already wrapped wedding present from him to Sonia. It hardly seems like the sort of request one can refuse, so Cameron reluctantly sets off.

The uncertainty of the reunion constantly looms in front of her and the ghosts of her past pop up to continually complicate matters. Arriving in Boston, she is shocked to realize that Sonia has disappeared. As she tries to retrace her former friend's steps, she reconnects with Will, Sonia's old boyfriend, who has always harbored a secret desire for Cameron. While Sonia proves difficult to find, Cameron is haunted by memories that seem to have frozen her in time, starting when Sonia ran after her car at that West Texas gas station; she imagines that if she went back, she'd find her still waiting there.

Also, the " history" that Cameron had made could fit into a single cardboard box. It hadn't rooted her in anything, it just bought her to a place where there was nothing to guide her, nothing to tell her which way to go. And she hated Oliver for giving her this errand, "for being so difficult to live with in the beginning, for making her love him then leaving her."

So, what is in the mysterious package, and just what broke up Cameron and Sonia's friendship? Author, Leah Stewart carefully weaves the filaments of the past together with the present, painting a portrait of two girls, who once were close, but who were also enormously competitive, especially with regard to boys. Sonia grappled hold of her life, and then in exchange offered Cameron her own. "We rescued each other not only from a speeding car, but from our separateness, each of us once the savior and the saved."

Stewart writes skillfully of place and time, her protagonist caught in an emotional and poignant dilemma. As Sonia begins to retrace her past, it strikes her that as well as she knew Sonia, she really new only one version of her, and "that all you know of life are the places where it touches your own."

For Cameron, life presents two options: "You could be the one who got back on the road, or you could be the one left behind." Over and over, her life blurred around her until there was nothing but the forward motion of her car. She has been running away ever since she left Sonia outside that gas station.

Stewart takes the vague memory of childhood friendship and fashions it into an intriguing drama shaped by love, trust, friendship, and loyalty. Sonia and Cameron's relationship was beautifully uncomplicated, where at fifteen, they even wrote each other "into our memories." But both women discover that years on, the rules of grieving for a friendship are endlessly more complicated than those for nursing a traditional broken heart. And they both come to realize that they cannot let each other go so easily. Mike Leonard October 05.