FOLLOW ME

Author: Mary Beth Bass ISBN: 0505526344 5/2005 CONTEMPROARY Publisher: DORCHESTER/Love Spell

Claire Islington has everything. Her boyfriend is a handsome doctor who adores her. She owns her own successful in Boston. Only a selfish fool would complain or want more. And yet Claire does. For seven years, she’s been haunted by desire. That’s how long it’s been since she allowed herself to chase her dream. Then, it almost killed her. That was the last time she felt his touch. It was the last—and only—time they made love. Her body still aches with remembrance. Oh yes, she still feels her dream lover—tingling beneath her skin, in the tips of her fingers and in the roots of her hair. She opens her mouth and he breathes inside her. And she feels him in other places. Her soul echoes the refrain, “Love is enough,” and yearns for a long-denied fulfillment. But to follow is to follow a ghost: across the sea, to another land, to another time, to the nineteenth-century English midlands and a point where lives collide. And to follow is to give up what Claire knows for the hope of what can be.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

This is a very interesting and intriguing book, written with a lovely flowing type of vague descriptions never completely put together. I enjoyed it immensely, became immersed in the confusion of it, actually, and I must admit, a lot of it still escapes me. Especially the ending, which I believe to be happy, but then again it might not be. You see, though it comes together for the reader in bits and pieces, that vagueness I speak of may turn some readers off.

There are half written ideas and thoughts, jumbled happenings, and scenes left a bit unfinished or explained. Yes, I am able to put what I consider to be the important parts of it together, and I am able to follow it closely enough that I understand what is happening (mostly, anyway), but some may be discouraged by the slow pace and strangeness of the beginning and skip ahead to really see what is happening.

It's like this: You know, yet you cannot be sure because there is not enough information, and what there is doesn't quite add up. Also, you don't want to wait to see if what you suspect is correct, accompanied by the maddening frustration of wanting the author to just spell it out for you now, feeling "Anticipation, it's making me wait."

I realize my review is just as vague as the book itself, but I refuse to give too much away. That, and the fact that describing every element put into this book is downright impossible, and glossing over the plot in no way does it justice. What I mean to say is that the tale is lovely, sad, strange, choppy, happy, eerie, wonderful, yet confusing enough to make it more than compelling. All the elements needed to give you a book that haunts you and goads you into believing there is so much we still don't know about the place or bodies we inhabit. We, being those living and those not.

Shannon Johnson