Love & leftovers

Overview

When her parents' marriage ends, Marcie is uprooted from Idaho and relocated to New Hampshire with her mother, who is struggling visibly with depression and has little bandwidth left over for her daughter. The upheaval is compounded by the reason behind the split: Marcie's father has come out as gay and is building a new life with a boyfriend, a development Marcie is still learning how to feel about.

Displaced and homesick, Marcie longs for Idaho — for the tight-knit group of friends she and her boyfriend, Linus, half-jokingly call the "leftovers," the ones who never quite fit the popular crowd. Instead of settling into her new surroundings, she finds herself drawn into an unplanned romance with J.D., a charismatic boy whose friendship crosses a line she didn't mean to cross.

Eventually Marcie returns to Idaho to live with her father, expecting to slide back into the life she left. Instead she discovers that Linus and the rest of her old circle have moved on in ways that force her to reckon with what she owes them, and what she owes herself.

Between Two Households

Love & Leftovers is less interested in a single romantic triangle than in the slower, messier process of a family reassembling itself after divorce. Marcie's story is really two stories at once: a coming-of-age narrative about first love and its complications, and a quieter one about a teenager absorbing her father's coming out and her mother's depression without a script for how to do either.

The novel's title captures its central preoccupation with what gets left behind — friendships, a hometown, a version of a family — and what has to be carried forward and refit into a new shape. Marcie's nickname for her friend group signals how she sees herself: not discarded, exactly, but set aside, and unsure whether that status is temporary. The book sits within a broader body of YA fiction that treats blended and reconfigured families, and parents' same-sex relationships specifically, as ordinary facts of a teenager's life rather than as plot twists to be resolved.

Why Love & Leftovers Has Been Challenged

Objections to the novel have centered on its portrayal of a father who leaves his marriage for a same-sex relationship, with challengers citing the book's LGBTQ content as inappropriate for teen readers. The novel's frank handling of teen romantic and sexual relationships — including Marcie's shifting attachments between two boys — has also drawn scrutiny from those who consider such material unsuitable for a high-school audience. Within this catalog, the title has been challenged or banned in 1 state and 1 district, reflecting these concerns rather than any dispute over its literary craftsmanship.