Leave Myself Behind
by Bart Yates

When your job includes both ordering new books and weeding old ones, and you’re paying any attention at all, you learn something not everybody realizes: you can’t force your tastes on your patrons. Or use fiction selection to foist your political or social views on them. We had a long-ago manager who just refused to believe this, and felt you could change people by force of will.

Which leaves me, now, at a library with about 50% minority patrons, and maybe 40% religious patrons, weeding books about gay white men by the truckload.* And while the purchasing seems to have been indiscriminate (short story collections full of poorly written “erotica” abound, along with bubble-headed chick lit in drag) I’ve tried to sort out real literature from the crap.

Which is where Leave Myself Behind comes in.

Our narrator is one Noah York, son of a famous poet mother and recently dead father. In an attempt to move past their loss, Mom moves them from Chicago to a small town in New Hampshire, where they spend the summer before Noah’s senior year renovating the old Victorian house they’ve purchased. Two complications develop in short order: the discovery of strange objects and messages hidden in the walls of the house, and Noah’s increasing complicated feelings for his first friend in his new home, J.D.

Here’s where the BAM Challenge theme finally ties in. While unraveling the mysteries behind the bottles inside the walls, Noah and J.D. end up learning much more: who their real friends (and true family) are, and secrets from their parents’ generation that shape who they are today.

J.D. makes for an interesting choice of character name, as comparisons between Noah and Holden Caulfield are pretty obvious (to the point where it’s mentioned in the book jacket reviews). I may not be qualified to say so, having never actually finished Catcher in the Rye, but I think Noah’s the better of the two. He’s more self-aware, willing to examine his emotions, and able to admit when he’s being a total ass. The narrative style is very natural and conversational, no matter how introspective the subject.

The events of the story are by turns touching and gruesome, but the telling never falters. I’d recommend this one to anyone interested in serious and thought provoking coming-of-age novels, from older teens to adults.

*Other system libraries have copies (which we can easily obtain for someone if they request one), and their copies get checked out, by the way. I’m not depriving anyone of gay white men novels; I’m making room to shelve things my patrons actually read.