Review of After the Leaves Fall

Nicole Baart’s debut novel tells the story of Julia DeSmit, whose mother abandons the family when Julia is nine years old and whose father dies when she is a teenager, leaving her alone with her devout grandmother. The entire novel chronicles Julia’s inner life as she trudges after Thomas, the older neighborhood boy she falls in love with as a way a assuage her loneliness, and later attends a prestigious college on an academic scholarship, where she reinvents herself as a sophisticated engineering student who dates an older teaching assistant.

Though Baart’s debut left me curious about her later, presumably more mature, fully-realized work, I struggled to get to the end of After the Leaves Fall and forgot the underdeveloped characters as soon as I turned my Kindle off, at least until the last 20% of the novel. Baart paints her characters in swaths so broad that I cannot envision any of the major characters, including the narrator herself.

When Julia tells the story of her selfish, negligent mother, for example, I don’t see enough of the mother to understand her motivation. She survives only as a caricature for me, in part because Baart fails to convey Julia’s emotions towards her mother in such a way that I feel rather than see the impact of the mother on her young daughter. This novel illustrates the problem of telling rather than showing, as we see mere outlines of characters rather than living, breathing people whose full range of emotions come alive for us. When her college roommate invites Julia to walk to orientation with her, Julia writes, “I didn’t fool myself into thinking it was because she liked me better.” This and similar statements are not supported with objective material, the absence of which makes me feel as if I am living in the mind of a self-absorbed teenager.

The last 20%, a finely written portrait of a young woman taking responsibility for her decisions, finally depicts a more mature and likable Julia. The grandmother’s role remains a problem even in the end because she is still too one-dimensional to become real. Nevertheless, her influence on Julia and Julia’s faith provides the key to Julia’s growing maturity. As she struggles with the idea of God—not yet ready to make a decision one way or the other—Julia becomes real, and this last section of the novel finally moves me as no other section has.

I downloaded After the Leaves Fall free. If the eBook were still free, I would recommend giving it a try, but for the current $8.79, I recommend that readers begin with a more mature work by Baart unless they’ve become such fans that they want to read her extant works.