6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Remarkable Achievement, May 6, 2006
Stay With Me is a highly complex and rewarding young adult novel. It tells of a year in the life of sixteen-year-old Leila Abranel, a New York City high school student with a rather unconventional family. Leila begins her story indirectly, recounting her occasional meetings with her sisters' mother. Leila has two much older half-sisters, from her father's doomed first marriage. Leila admires her vibrant and quirky sister Rebecca, and turns to her for advice, while respecting her more formal sister Clare's preference to remain distant. The family has a balance, if an unusual one, right up until Rebecca commits suicide.
After Rebecca's clearly premediatated suicide, everything changes for Leila. Her parents take a one-year job helping to create a new teaching hospital in Poland. Leila moves in with her sister Clare, and has Raphael, a distant cousin (and former boyfriend of Clare's), as a secondary guardian. Leila goes on with her life - school, a part-time job, finally getting to know Clare - but struggles to understand Rebecca's suicide. She latches on to her last sighting of Rebecca, and tries to find the person that Rebecca was with at the time, thinking that he might have some insight for her.
This book is about so many different things. Stay With Me is about what it means to be a family. (Raphael, despite his relatively distant family connection, helps Leila with her homework, gives her advice, and takes on a near-parental role.) Stay With Me is about trusting your own body (and yourself), and knowing what you are and are not ready for sexually. Stay With Me is about why someone with most of her life ahead of her would commit suicide, and the devastating impact of a suicide on the people left behind. Stay With Me is about what it's like to be dyslexic (Leila is dyslexic), and how it can affect a person's entire way of thinking.
And yes, as you are sure to read in other reviews, Stay With Me is about teen-aged Leila's friendship with and sexual interest in a 31-year-old man, Eamon. What I found remarkable about this entire storyline was how normal Freymann-Weyr made it seem, and how NOT creepy the plot-line was. I want to be sure to get this across to you, because I was initially hesitant to read the book, knowing about this Lolita-esque theme. Leila's relationship with Eamon is an important part of the book, but it's only a part of a much more fully realized story, and it's handled exceedingly well.
I found Stay With Me to be very well-written. The characters, especially Leila, are complex and realistic. Leila's voice is particularly engaging. Her dyslexia shapes her perceptions of herself, her ability to make decisions, and her day-to-day life, with a pervasiveness that I hadn't anticipated or understood before reading this book. Somehow Freymann-Weyr conveys this without ever making Leila someone to be pitied or ridiculed over her learning disability. It's a remarkable achievement.
I think that high school readers will enjoy this book, especially those with learning disabilities or unconventional families (and what family seems normal, when you're in high school?). And I think that teens who are (horrifyingly) curious about suicide will find in this book a subtle, but strong, anti-suicide message. I believe in general that parents should read as many of the books that their kids read as possible. But I especially believe that parents should read Stay With Me with their kids. There are many great discussion points in the book.
As you can tell, I liked this book a lot. The plot is multi-layered without being confusing, with a nice blend of poignancy, humor, tension. I read it in a single day, not so much because I needed to know what happened, as because I wanted to spend more time with Leila, and make sure that she was alright. But I won't tell you the answer to that. You'll have to read Stay With Me yourself.
This book review was originally published on my blog, Jen Robinson's Book Page, on May 6th, 2006.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Breathtaking & Brave, April 28, 2006
Much like this author's last novel My Heartbeat - this new effort deals with relationships and how complicated, confusing and messy they can be. The protagonist Leila navigates her way through her complicated family, an "impossible" and "all wrong" relationship with a much older man and coping with her sister's suicide. Indeed it as Leila moves away from needing a reason for her sister Rebecca's death towards accepting the loss, that she matures and grows. I think one of Garret Freymann-Weyr's strengths as an author is her ability to create characters who demand the reader's, attention, concern and attachment. Leila in this novel and Ellen in My Heartbeat live on in a little corner of my heart. I would still say My Heartbeat outshines Stay With Me - but that's based on how tender and unsure Ellen was.
Now I am going to address an issue which I am sure is going to come up: Leila's relationship with a thirty-one year old man. Freymann-Weyr is very brave for not compromising Leila's story by turning her relationship with Eamon into a morality lesson. In describing people's reactions to their relationship Eamon states "the men all think I've done something brilliant and...the women think I should be shot." In real life - I would probably fall into the latter category and in real life I can't fathom their relationship working due to their differences in life experiences. But this is a work of fiction - and people sometimes forget that. I wish readers would remember: that by including a controversial/edgy topic in a book - an author is not advocating it in real life. Unfortunately this is what I think holds YA fiction back - but fortunately we have authors like Freymann-Weyr who are brave enough to tell their characters' stories without compromise.
Stay With Me is a heartbeaking and intense experience. I cannot wait to see what Freymann-Weyr has in store for us next!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This story will stay with you, January 8, 2007
"Stay with me," I say, wishing I'd said it to my sister but also wanting to hear it from him.
"Stay with you?" he asks.
"No," I say. "You've messed up the pronoun."
Leila is the product of her father's second marriage. Her parents are still happily married, and she is their only child. She has two half-sisters from her father's first marriage, but she is not as close to them as she would like to be. Rebecca and Clare were in their twenties with Leila was born, so even though she is now approaching the age of seventeen, Leila still feels like a kid in their presence.
Even more remarkable than her parents' loving marriage is Leila's other source of adult support: Janie, her father's first wife. The book begins with Leila's memories of Janie, and the loss she felt when Janie passed away. It continues with the revelation that Rebecca has committed suicide, causing those familiar feelings of loss and regret to rise to the surface but in a new way. As Leila attempts to figure out what would cause Rebecca to do such a thing, she makes startling discoveries about her family members - and herself. What she thought she knew may not be true at all.
"There's such a gap between the images I carry in my mind and what can actually be found in the world."
Among many other things, Leila learns that nothing valuable is easy. Her life is as complex as that of any real person, and the book seamlessly weaves together various plotlines that touch Leila's life, with each given appropriate weight and attention. In Freymann-Weyr's best novel to date, the author has created characters who are intelligent, each in his or her own way, and realistically flawed. The first-person narrative is poignant and poetic, offering many memorable scenes and exchanges of dialogue.
"For me, they are one more thing that belongs in someone else's story."
This book is something to savor and share. Leila's story with stay with readers long after they finish the last page. Highly recommended to adults and older teens.
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