What You Left Behind

by Jessica Verdi

[Ashley]

2.5 stars

Man, it kills me that I didn't love this book. :( I adore Jessica and her other books, so this literally breaks my heart!

The biggest thing that kills it for me is what we find out at the end...

At the end, we find out that Meg got pregnant on purpose.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK???

She wrote in her journal admitting this, and spouted a bunch of bull shit about wanting to leave behind a legacy.

LEGACY MY ASS! Here’s the ugly truth of what went down:

* She got intimate with a man. He said, "Oh crap, I forgot a condom," clearly worried about pregnancy and STDs. She lied to his face by saying she was on the pill, because she was INTENDING to get pregnant, all while knowing she was going to die.

* She got pregnant and kept acting like it was some big mistake.

* She gave birth and died (as she claimed to know would happen all along).

* She intentionally left Ryden behind as a single, teenage dad.

She went into this whole thing KNOWING she was going to leave Ryden as a single, teenage dad. She knew he had dreams to play sports and go to college. She literally DESTROYED those dreams.

Lying to someone and using them to get pregnant is bad enough. That’s horrible. But when you do it KNOWING that you’re going to also make them a single parent.. what the bloody fuck is that? She wanted to create a legacy but knew she wasn’t going to be around to help raise it.

I can’t even.

This was just one of those things there was no coming back from. It clouded my opinion of the entire story. It’s like I saw red and then couldn’t see anything else. I hated Meg and her spoiled asshat decisions with every fibre of my being.