After the Moment by Garret Freymann-Weyr

May 18th 2009 by Houghton Mifflin

Hardcover, 328 pages

Borrowed

Book Synopsis

 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......(Goodreads)

Review

OH, the power of teen romance….the dramatic doomed adventures of love here now and gone forever. You know the kind I’m talking about- the characters so destined to be together yet somehow always miss that opportunity to really make it happen. After the Moment is told through the voice of Leigh, who in the beginning of the novel is an adult man reflecting on his past after a brief encounter with Maia, his high school love. Leigh is a pretty good guy, much more mature than your average 17 year old, he’s smart, cares extremely for his family, especially his little step-sister who in the story portrays the ‘wise child’ and sets things in motion for the teens tortured love story.  Leigh reminded me of Nicholas Sparks melancholy John, right down to the challenging father, although John comes full circle in his story, I felt Leigh never really did. I think his decisions haunt him and even years later after the moment….he still lives in that moment.

The writing I found was smart for dialog but did not draw me in as a reader, I felt very outside of the book and felt Leigh said and thought things that didn’t fit his character. Perhaps that was because he was flashing back as an adult but regardless Leigh never really fit the age of a teenage boy. For example a major thought in Leigh’s head was the Iraq war…and how he was going to escape to Canada with the help of his parents if there was a draft. One sentence of this was enough for me but Leigh expresses this over and over and over…not hard to guess the authors thoughts on the Iraq War or President Bush.....and  that’s where many authors including this one, lose me with political bashing. I really don’t care how much you hate the republicans or in the rare instance the liberals but come on, if your protagonist is going to be a Bush hater at least let it make sense within the story and not yammering constantly about dodging a draft that never happened or has happened since the Vietnam War.

Needless to say, I never felt connected to the characters nor did I buy one second of Leigh and Maia’s love story. Maia was so blahze about her self-destructive behavior that instead of coming across tortured girl in need to be saved,  she just irritated me. The sexual content was looked at so casual -even the disturbing stuff- that I couldn’t perceive any of the book as serious and the fact that the plot moved so slowly didn’t help me connect to the story either. A combination of unbelievable characters, romance and slow pacing determined this to be a book not for me but some of you out there might enjoy this, I would recommend it to adults or the more mature teen who wants to try and go deep. I believe most teens will not enjoy the slow pacing and will not connect to the storyline but then again I could be wrong so take your chances and find out if After the Moment is for you.

Rating

After the Moment is suitable for the mature teen/adult. Content includes: Lying, betrayal, rape, drinking, sexual discussions and content, grief, depression and mild language.

2/5- YA, Coming of Age Romance