‘Noth­ing has been the same since Caleb Becker left a party drunk, got behind the wheel, and hit Mag­gie Arm­strong. Even after months of painful phys­i­cal ther­apy, Mag­gie walks with a limp. Her social life is nil and a schol­ar­ship to study abroad—her chance to escape every­one and their pity­ing stares—has been canceled.

After a year in juve­nile jail, Caleb’s free … if free­dom means end­less nag­ging from a tran­si­tion coach and the pry­ing eyes of the entire town. Com­ing home should feel good, but his fam­ily and ex-girlfriend seem like strangers.

Caleb and Mag­gie are out­siders, pigeon-holed as “crim­i­nal” and “freak.” Then the truth emerges about what really hap­pened the night of the acci­dent and, once again, every­thing changes. It’s a bleak and tor­tu­ous jour­ney for Caleb and Mag­gie, yet they end up find­ing com­fort and strength from a sur­pris­ing source: each other.’

I’m review­ing these two books together because I breezed through them both in about four hours. I have to be hon­est — I was dis­ap­pointed. Elke­les can, and has, done so much bet­ter. These felt like short sto­ries and for the life of me I’m not entirely sure why Caleb and Maggie’s story was stretched out into two books.

Leav­ing Par­adise had an inter­est­ing premise, and after read­ing Per­fect Chem­istry I was excited to see what else Elke­les had to offer, but I can’t get excited over this one. I felt mildly bored and a lit­tle irri­tated while read­ing. Per­fect Chem­istry worked so well because the attrac­tion and ten­sion was well han­dled — sadly, the same can’t be said here. The pac­ing was com­pletely off — Caleb and Mag­gie just have no chem­istry between them and went from hatred (on Maggie’s side), to indif­fer­ence (on Caleb’s side) to sud­denly con­fid­ing their deep­est secrets and falling head over heels for one another. Or so Elke­les kept telling me — I just didn’t see it and felt like I had missed some­thing along the way.

I also couldn’t con­nect with the char­ac­ters. Nei­ther left much of an impres­sion on me — Mag­gie was just frus­trat­ing to say the least. I really tried to like her, I just couldn’t. She refuses to put any effort or work into her phys­i­cal ther­apy, but whines about her limp. Now while I do sym­pa­thise with her, she’s had a crappy year and it’s nat­ural for her to resent the acci­dent and feel self-conscious of her leg, but if she wants to heal and walk bet­ter, she needs to put the effort in. I’m with Mrs Reynolds on this one. Her frankly embar­rass­ing and weird obses­sion with Caleb was awk­ward to read about, hear­ing how she used to spy on him hav­ing sex with his girl­friend and then telling him she was cheat­ing on him with his best friend while beg­ging him to date her instead didn’t endear me to her in the slight­est. In fact it was off-putting — Mag­gie came across as des­per­ate, needy, obses­sive and manip­u­la­tive and I’m not sur­prised Caleb avoided her or felt uncom­fort­able around her even before the accident.

Caleb was over­all a nice guy, though occa­sion­ally quite self-centered. He returns home from jail expect­ing every­thing and every­one to go back to the way it was before the acci­dent. His fam­ily clearly isn’t cop­ing well at all, but rather than try to under­stand how badly he’s hurt them, try­ing to help or fix the sit­u­a­tion, Caleb gets caught up in his own prob­lems. He is gen­uinely sweet and con­sid­er­ate towards Mag­gie though, but the jump from being a child­hood friend, to blam­ing her for ruin­ing his life, to being all he thinks about, just didn’t work for me at all. The fact that Caleb was well aware Mag­gie had a crush on him and he wasn’t inter­ested in the slight­est before the acci­dent made his sud­den feel­ings for her even more unbe­liev­able, on top of the fact that we never see any pro­gres­sion or build­ing attraction.

If there was one char­ac­ter I did love, it was Mrs Reynolds — an eccen­tric, bossy old lady who said what I was think­ing most of the time. Also — she had a habit of belt­ing out songs randomly.

Over­all, Leav­ing Par­adise (awful name for a town) just fell flat for me. Noth­ing much actu­ally hap­pened, and the rela­tion­ship (what lit­tle there was of it) between Caleb and Mag­gie felt forced. I don’t mind that they’re together, but I don’t believe it’s some great love affair — Elke­les just didn’t sell it to me. As the syn­op­sis hints, there is some­thing more to the acci­dent, but I felt Maggie’s real­i­sa­tion of it was badly exe­cuted and unre­al­is­tic; and inter­est­ing sub-plots were under-developed, for exam­ple Maggie’s rela­tion­ship with her father. How­ever, it was an enjoy­able enough read, and Caleb and Mag­gie do have some sweet moments — I liked how they pushed one another to move on, and be them­selves, it was just lack­ing the pas­sion I would have expected from an Elke­les novel. The end­ing, though abrupt, I quite liked, but would have loved, if more had been devel­oped and resolved prior to it in the book.

Rec­om­mended Read­ing Age: 16+

Rat­ing: 6/10

Return to Par­adise by Simone Elkeles

‘Caleb Becker left Par­adise eight months ago, tak­ing with him the secret he promised to take to his grave. If the truth got out, it would ruin everything. 

Mag­gie Arm­strong tried to be strong after Caleb broke her heart and dis­ap­peared. Some­how, she man­aged to move on. She’s deter­mined to make a new life for herself. 

But then Caleb and Mag­gie are forced together on a sum­mer trip. They try ignor­ing their pas­sion for each other, but buried feel­ings resur­face. Caleb must face the truth about the night of Maggie’s acci­dent, or the secret that destroyed their rela­tion­ship will for­ever stand between them.’ 

Return to Par­adise fol­lows on 8 months after the first book, and though they try to pre­tend oth­er­wise, Caleb and Mag­gie are clearly still pin­ing after one another. They meet up again fairly quickly (after some slightly con­trived cir­cum­stances) at Re-START — telling their sto­ries to other kids about the dan­gers of drink driving.

I have to say that the sec­ond book in this series frus­trated me far more than the first. There was a dis­tinct lack of plot, and instead we get pages and pages of Caleb and Mag­gie fight­ing one sec­ond, kiss­ing the next, push­ing one another away, flirt­ing, then back to pre­tend­ing they have moved on again. They broke up, then went their sep­a­rate ways, they changed their minds and got back together again, all the while know­ing they only had two weeks before Mag­gie went to Spain for 9 months. It drove me nuts, and frankly, made lit­tle sense. Mag­gie wants an hon­est rela­tion­ship, but knows Caleb is lying about the acci­dent. Caleb — I couldn’t really fig­ure out what his motives were. He went from being a nice guy in the first book to being full of anger and down­right nasty and manip­u­la­tive in Return to Par­adise. Why the hell they couldn’t just admit their feel­ings and tell the truth about the acci­dent I don’t know. I under­stand Caleb was pro­tect­ing his sis­ter (who as an impor­tant char­ac­ter we barely see), but by the end of two books, enough was enough and every­thing was drawn out and made far more angsty than it needed to be.

Mag­gie showed a lot more strength of char­ac­ter in Return to Par­adise, but this was under­mined by her waver­ing feel­ings for Caleb. One minute she’s moved on, the next she knows she’ll never love any­one else and wants to help Caleb reunite with his fam­ily. They just didn’t seem to have much of a rela­tion­ship at all, and this was only more high­lighted by the fact that Mag­gie has a future planned out and leaves for Spain, going of to live her own life, before return­ing briefly, before leav­ing again for college.

They were some impor­tant story arcs and char­ac­ters that I was wait­ing to see devel­oped, but they just never fully mate­ri­al­ized — Maggie’s father is, once again, glossed over and the rela­tion­ship between her mother and Lou is never fully explored either. Leah’s accep­tance over what she had done and the deci­sion to tell the truth was well writ­ten but I wanted more and we should have seen some back story and build up, other than she started wear­ing black clothes and was clearly depressed. There was also some unnec­es­sary drama with Brian and Kendra.

Return to Par­adise is not a ter­ri­ble book, despite my com­plaints, it’s worth a read if you’re an Elke­les fan — but to be hon­est it lacked any plot and Mag­gie and Caleb’s story could have eas­ily have been done well in one novel. Instead it was dragged out and got to the point where the character’s motives just didn’t make sense any more. I wasn’t really drawn to Mag­gie and Caleb in the first book, and liked them even less in this one. I just wasn’t con­vinced of their feel­ings for one another and I know Elke­les can write some fab­u­lous chem­istry between characters.

Ulti­mately, this wasn’t as good as Leav­ing Par­adise and unfor­tu­nately has an awful, cheesy epi­logue that made me cringe (much like the cover!)

Rec­om­mended Read­ing Age: 16+

Rat­ing: 5/10