A review by caroleheidi
What We Left Behind by Robin Talley

3.0

After loving Robin Talley's Lies We Tell Ourselves, I was really excited to read this book and I think that is why I found it so disappointing. It wasn't a bad book but it was merely average at best. There wasn't much of a plot at all beyond the two main characters Gretchen and Toni leaving High School and going to College - nothing else of note happens in the entire book - it is all about the characters themselves and their development. Which would have been fine if the characters had depth to them, but sadly most of them did not. Gretchen was okay but Toni was unlikable and had nothing about her other than her overwhelming confusion about her gender and sexuality. At first she was interesting but after a while she just felt whiney rather than anything else and I disliked the way Genderqueer was made to sound like an interim term for people deciding whether or not they are transgender - in my personal experience it is not that at all. I could go on about things that bugged me but I have already gone over my 100 word limit, so I won't. What We Left Behind had plenty of potential to be an interesting and informative book but it fell short of the mark somewhere and left me feeling like I'd read a book on cardboard cut-out characters of varying gender and sexual orientations with no depth to the story or the people.