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Title: Leaving Eden

Author: Anne D. LeClaire

Narrator: Pamela Steele

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-25-08

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 8 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

While jotting down observations in her Rulebook for Living (such as "Women with fat faces shouldn't wear bangs" and "Beetles signify change"), Tallie finds herself changing in unexpected ways - as she tests the limits of trust, explores her growing attraction to a boy from a family as rich as her imagination, and reaches for the sky like she has never done before.

By turns funny and tender, joyous and poignant, best-selling author Anne LeClaire has written a winning, stylish novel of small-town Southern life - and what it means to be a mother, daughter, best friend, wife, and lover.

Critic Reviews:

"Saturated with death and loss yet bursting with life, [this is] a beautiful, reflective meditation on friendship in its many guises." (Booklist)

"Reader Pamela Steele hits the mark, bringing such life and believability to her portrayals of characters and their emotions that each soon becomes someone we all know." (AudioFile)

Members Reviews:

Four Stars

Weak ending.

I didn't think I was going to like this book when I began to read it

I didn't think I was going to like this book when I began to read it, but it's gotten me hooked because of Tallie's struggles and loneliness during her teen age years. I have yet to finish it and will be eager to do so.

wise, compassionate and evocative "Eden" celebrates hope

What does it mean to make wise choices in life? How is it possible for a sensitive teen-ager to comprehend the significance of a mother's love when its source is no longer present? How much should one risk for dreams, desires and hopes? What is it about wanting that makes it so consuming, so overpowering? Anne LeClaire's sensitive, lyrical and evocative coming-of-age novel, "Leaving Eden," provides stunning, instructive answers. Her protagonist, sixteen year-old Tallie Brock does not consider her hometown of suggestively-named Eden, Virginia to be paradise; nor does she realize that the knowledge she so earnestly seeks about life could compel her to an act of self-banishment.

What Talie does know is heartbreak and abandonment. Not once, but twice, does her mother leave her. Blessed with Natalie Wood-like looks, Dinah Mae Brock wrestles with her own need to live out her dreams. After Dinah Mae abruptly leaves her diligent, devoted husband Luddy for the hopes of realizing her life-long ambition of becoming a Hollywood stgar, her bright, inquisitive but disaffected daughter must confront her own demons and ask herself questions she is not initially prepared to confront.

Without the comfort and security of her mother, Tallie lacks "context" for her life and yearns to see the "whole picture" instead of the "jangly bits and pieces that didn't seem to fit." Insecure with her own physical appearance, a social outsider whose anxieties are exacerbated by an intolerably smug and critical maternal grandmother, Tallie has yet to discover that "things don't always have to be laid out straight as string to make sense." Trying to make sense of his own loneliness, Luddy takes to drink to obliterate pain.