In Leah’s Wake is one of those novels that made me think. It wasn’t meant to be informational, but because the story involved a teenaged girl who suddenly goes from sports star to rebellious druggie, part of my mind compartmentalized it into a parenting manual: “When Good Girls Go Bad.”
Leah is a soccer star and she and her dad are already counting on full scholarships to college. She’s respected by her peers and her coaches. But then she meets Todd, who is slightly older and definitely bad news. It sort of sounds like a bad TV movie, but in reality author Terri Guiliano Long writes about the complexities of marriage and parenting (and even, from Leah’s and 12-year-old Justine’s viewpoints, the difficulties of growing up).
One of the truest things about this book is the reality of the voices. Specifically, Leah is the picture of a young adult getting ready to leave the nest. Her maturity in years, however, is eclipsed by her blind spot when it comes to Todd. The past teenager in me related to the fact that she truly thought that she knew best and thought she had a mature response to this situation, when the mom in me kept cringing, and yes, even wanted to shout at her, “Wake up, girl! Get back on track! Your parents are not the enemy!”
There are no quick and easy solutions here for Leah or for her parents. They each struggle through, learning in their own ways and taking responsibility for their actions in their own times, but as they are doing so, they pulled me right along as I continued to make comparisons to my own life.
Terri Guiliano Long published In Leah’s Wake via CreateSpace. It’s available for Kindle for a very reasonable price, but is also a nicely priced paperback. I am usually somewhat skeptical of self-published books, but the storyline intrigued me, and I’m glad that I read it. A mainstream publishing house might have tightened it up some, but it doesn’t feel amateurish or unprofessional at all.
Jennifer Donovan doesn’t have any children who are expert athletes, and she hopes, though doesn’t bank on, the fact that they won’t rebel. She blogs about her own ups and downs in parenting at Snapshot.