Every Time You Go Away

Title: Every Time You Go Away

Author: Beth Harbison

Every Time You Go Away… I Know You’ll Be Back Over and Over Again.

I love a good ghost story however this silly, overly sentimental story about a grieving young widow who is unable to move on three years after her husband died of a sudden cardiac event is not one I could relate to. The themes of love, loss, and grief were overplayed as to have lost their meaning and the message was literally crammed down our throats.

Willa lost her thirty-six year old husband suddenly. He died while working in their beach vacation home, a place of fond summertime memories. Willa’s grief is all consuming and though there doesn’t seem to be much of an example of how she shirked her mothering duties apparently she hasn’t been there for her teenage son or readily acknowledged his grief though she does feel the guilt of that.

Now, three years after Ben died, her seventeen year old son Jamie spends his time with his psycho girlfriend and just getting by in school. Willa decides it’s time to visit the beach house and get it ready to list for sale. While there, she comes upon a young boy who eerily looks the way her dead husband looked as a boy. As Willa contends with a house that needs some real work in order to sell, an overzealous real estate agent hungry for a big commission and a plumber who delivers bad news about her pipes, Willa starts to see Ben’s ghost, first as nothing more than an observer of scenes in his life that occurred but in which she cannot interact then later as a active participant in conversations between the two of them as well as the ability to see him as if he is really there.

The problem is that no one else can see him but Willa so Willa just seems alone in her craziness.

Ben is on a mission, though he has no idea how he has gotten “permission” to hang out in Willa’s world, to get his perpetually grieving wife to move on without him, even fall in love again and get married. Ben tells her that once he has achieved his goal, he will be forever gone.

Ben keeps appearing over and over and just when you think it’s the last time, it isn’t. The scenes play out ad-nauseum and the storyline drags on as Willa, surrounded by family and friends seems content to keep up a permanent relationship with a ghost. I do believe in ghost sightings but could not relate to this story at all. It was so farfetched as to almost seem disrespectful of real sightings. For those very strong skeptics, this book is a simpering pile of ridiculous notions.

Memory lane is revisited again and again to the point of no longer caring. The author could have balanced out the silliness with juicy scenes involving that textbook psycho girlfriend coming into contact with a potential new girlfriend or a final showdown with a pushy real estate agent consumed by dollar signs but the reader couldn’t even get that much.

Don’t waste your time.

BRB Rating: Skip It.

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