Leaving Paradise by Simone Elkeles

Leaving Paradise by Simone Elkeles

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After I read Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles, I somehow thought Leaving Paradise was the next book in that series. It didn't take me long to realize I was wrong. But, when I read the blurb, I was convinced I would like Leaving Paradise even better than Perfect Chemistry.

Thinking back to all the books I've ever read, Leaving Paradise fit more in that list than Perfect Chemistry did. When I started the book, I expected for the story to be different than how it turned out to be. It wasn't a bad book, not at all, just not completely what I expected.

The story and the (main) characters were very similar as the ones in Perfect Chemistry, yet, in a different setting.

Again, I loved the point of view switches. Sometimes point of view changes are a bad thing for the story, but for some reason the changes work perfectly for Simone Elkeles' books. Personally, I enjoy to see how both the main characters come to the wrong conclusions, are totally wrong when they think to know how the other one feels, and so on and on...

This story was a nice read, however, I wasn't quite ... satisfied with the ending. I don't want to spoil anything, but I had expected for the story to have the usual happy ending, not that it had a bad ending, it was good in its own way, just not what I expected.

Something else that I liked in this story was the truth, the secret that Caleb kept and how hard it was for him not to tell it to Maggie.

All in all I still enjoyed reading this book and I may even read it again in the future.



Some Quotes I liked:

- "I'm wondering if paradise is just some word in the dictionary with the definition: this doesn't fucking exist."
- "It's hard keeping everything the same when the same things look and feel so different"


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