After the Moment by Garret Freymann-Weyr

July 2, 2009

Maia Morland is pretty, only not pretty-pretty. She’s smart. She’s brave. She’s also a self-proclaimed train wreck. Leigh Hunter is smart, popular, and extremely polite. He’s also completely and forever in love with Maia Morland. Their young love starts off like a romance novel—full of hope, strength, and passion. But life is not a romance novel and theirs will never become a true romance. For when Maia needs him the most, Leigh betrays both her trust and her love. Told with compassion and true understanding, After the Moment is about what happens when a young man discovers that sometimes love fails us, and that, quite often, we fail love.

The first chapter of this book opens with Leigh (the books narrator) seeing Maia at a dinner party a few years after they had initially met. His reaction upon seeing her tells us that he obviously still has feelings for her and that things were probably left unresolved. From there we go on to find out how Leigh and Maia met and about their heart wrenching love story.

After a death in the family, Leigh leaves his single mother to spend his senior year in high school with his father, step-mother and step-sister, Millie. Amidst a tragedy, Leigh knows that his emotionally stunted father is usually not the best shoulder to lean on.

Almost immediately upon arrival, Leigh is introduced to Maia, who he soon finds out is anorexic, has OCD and to top it off, depression issues (yes, wow). Despite these issues, Leigh feels an immediate connection to Maia which baffles him...after all, he's dating the perfect and popular, Astra Grein. But the more time Leigh and Maia spend together the more he finds himself falling in love with her. After Maia experiences a horrible tragedy, she feels betrayed by Leigh when he mistakenly betrays her trust out of his own anger and rage. They eventually part ways and don't meet again until the dinner party.

I really enjoyed this book but it is a really difficult book to review because of its depth. Leigh is a complex and thoughtful main character. Unlike most teens he is almost hyper-aware of the world and people around him, whether it's his mother, his relationship with his father, his life after high school or the war going on Iraq, Leigh always seems engaged in critical thinking.

Overall, a wonderful story about the complexity of family relationships today and the splendor and the heartache of first love. With the sexual situations and alcohol references, I think this book is best suited for 8th grade and above.

Score: 4.5 points