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Stay With Me Garret FreymannWeyr Books

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Stay With Me Garret FreymannWeyr Books

I really loved this book. The protagonist, Leila, is just so likeable, and the family is just bizarre enough. Good enough to re-read.


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Stay With Me Garret FreymannWeyr Books Reviews

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.
The book Stay With Me is a wonderful story about love and loss and how one can lead straight to the other. Leila Abranel feels that she has been left behind when her much older sister, Rebecca, decides to take her own life. Rebecca was 20 years older than Leila and they had just truly begun to get to know one another. Leila was beginning to feel like she could talk to Rebecca about things that she couldn't talk to her parents about and then she overdosed on pills and ended any chance of a relationship Leila thought they might be able to have.

In the midst of the mourning and grief, Leila's parents decide that it might be best if they went ahead as planned and moved to Poland for a year, only with a slight change. Since Leila is only 16 she was going to be staying with Rebecca while they were gone but now they must ask her other sister, Clare, if she could take care of her while they are gone.
Leila never really felt like she fit in with her other sisters but she felt like she fit more with Rebecca because Clare was more the smart, workaholic type. Leila is dyslexic and so has always had trouble fitting in and feeling like she belongs but once she moves in with Clare, they start to learn new things about the other and form a close, sisterly bond.

Raphael also helps take care of Leila while her parents are in Poland. His mother was married to their uncle before she met his father and so he is their semi-cousin. Raphael and Clare once had a relationship but it didn't work for reasons that weren't really mentioned. Shortly after Leila moves in with Clare, Clare breaks up with her boyfriend and then once again starts a relationship with Raphael, forming a type of family for Leila to rely on.

While, Leila has tried to move on from her sister's death, she still feels like she is missing something and decides that she should try and find the reason Rebecca killed herself. In her quest for answers she gets a job at Cafe Acca, the last place she saw Rebecca. In a way Rebecca led Leila right to Eamon. Eamon is a 31 year old writer for TV shows and he immediately takes an interest in Leila, not knowing that she is only 16. Throughout the book Leila and Eamon go through many different phases and finally settle on dating even if other people think it is wrong of them.

In the end, Leila realizes that maybe Rebecca didn't really have a reason for killing herself, maybe she just gave up. She knows that what Rebecca did was selfish and inexcusable. Rebecca was only thinking of herself, not the people she would be leaving behind. Leila finally learns that she doesn't really need to know everything about her sister but that in her own way Rebecca led Leila right to her love, if not her great love then her great love for now.

Stay With Me is a story about coping with the sudden death of someone you love and how maybe you don't get over that, maybe you just find new ways to shape your life around it.
Once I started reading, I couldn't put this book down. It is a beautiful and compelling portrayal of a teenager trying to navigate her way through the "new now" after one of her much-older sisters commits suicide. Protagonist Leila is interesting and likable, and there's a good cast of well-fleshed-out supporting characters. It's a wonderful story of love and loss and family and learning to trust yourself.

There is sex, but it's not graphic, and the focus is on the emotional aspects rather than the physical. There is also a romantic relationship between a 17-year-old and a 31-year-old, but it was so well done that I didn't actually disapprove (this is definitely something that I would almost certainly disapprove of in real life!). But perhaps it's not the best book to recommend to younger teens. Then again, Leila's process for making decisions, whether sexual or otherwise, is so wonderfully healthy that perhaps this is the perfect book for younger teens! She has some wonderful adults in her life, she goes to them for advice when she isn't sure what to do or how to do something, and they help her figure out her own mind.

(Note I received a free copy of this book from the publisher at an American Library Association conference. I was not required to write a positive review. Thank you, Houghton Mifflin!)
I really loved this book. The protagonist, Leila, is just so likeable, and the family is just bizarre enough. Good enough to re-read.