Ghosted
Rosie Walsh’s Ghosted (called The Man Who Didn’t Call upon its British release) takes the reader into a labyrinthine tale about the power of romantic, parental and familial love, and the lengths a person in love might be willing to go to in order to protect that love.
For one perfect week, in a halcyon summer fling in the Gloucestershire countryside during their family vacations, thirty-seven year-old American-dwelling British ex-pat Sarah Mackey and Brit Eddie David fell in love. It was a spontaneous, out of nowhere love, but it feels true and real to Sarah; in her mid-30s, she’s never felt a connection like this to a man before, and Eddie confesses that he feels the same way about her. They make plans to meet again after Eddie finishes a business trip to London; when a week goes by and he doesn’t make contact, Sarah is convinced something serious has happened. She believes the connection between them is so strong that he’d never ghost her.
Sarah’s oldest friends, Jo and Tommy, think she should forget Eddie; it was just a single week, after all. But when Sarah begins to withdraw emotionally, Jo encourages her to keep chasing Eddie. As she does, memories flood back of a tragic incident involving her sister, the irrepressible and now fully estranged Hannah, and of her failing (and still undisclosed to Eddie) marriage to a doctor named Reuben; her own vocation as a doctor and the charity she started with him.
The deeper Sarah crawls into the wormhole of Eddie’s disappearance, the more she learns about him, and the messier her life becomes. Might Eddie have been driven off by Googling her? Might he really be dead now? Or is he hiding something? All she knows is that she wants the merry, laughing Eddie back in her life, and she will do anything to find him.
To reveal too much about Ghosted would be a sin. Let’s just say that that the situation with Sarah and Eddie is far more complex than either party even anticipated, which is what kept me eagerly turning the pages. The writing is smooth and engaging; very rich, lyrical and even ornate. it’s perfumed with longing and romance, with the pain of feeling the absence of one’s partner. It is about true love, in all of its forms, about secrets, about children lost and found, infidelity and change. It’s very human and very beautiful; heedlessly romantic and deeply tragic, sometimes quite soapy and sometimes quite kitchen-sink real.
Their romance is easy to believe in. Sarah’s uncertain future and dark past disappear whenever she’s around Eddie, and while she’s intently focused on him, her life continues and she continues to live it in all of its complications. Sarah and Eddie both have their guilt, layers and complexities, and unraveling them alongside them is fun work. It’s a very old-fashioned novel in many ways; it reminded me of early-period Danielle Steele in the best of ways.
Only one thing didn’t work for me – the events at the very end of the book felt a little too fairytale, a little too wave-the-magic-wand-and-all-is-well. But some readers will adore this, and in the end it doesn’t detract from the novel’s enchanting whole. Ghosted is ultimately a an appealing jewel of a novel with some very surprising and captivating twists.
Buy it at: Amazon/Barnes & Noble/iBooks/Kobo
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Lisa, exactly.
Jo, Tommy, Zoe, Jesse (was that the name of the best friend?), and let’s not forget Jo’s 7-yr-old son Rudi-with-an-i–to me, they all got way too much space in this story, but not in any sort of compelling, I-want-to-know-more-about-them way. TBH, I thought at times that these other characters were just added to pad the main story (in terms of actual page count) and in some cases as devices to artificially help drive an otherwise stalled storyline. Just my impression.
At the end of the day, I thought the author had an interesting idea–“What if this situation happened…?”–and just couldn’t quite figure out how to build a story organically around it.
I can see what she was trying to do with Jesse’s story (her infertility story was a mirror version of Sarah’s problems with her ex). I still don’t know what Rudi’s purpose was in the novel at this point.
Just finished this. I don’t usually care for the mystery genre, but this sounded interesting. Here’s my take: Grade for the first 125 pages or so (IOW, roughly the first half of the book) = C. Grade for the second half of the book = B. So altogether, I’d give it a B-.
I did really like the premise–what if you were “ghosted” by someone you thought you had a wonderful, though brief, relationship with? And you couldn’t shake that nagging feeling that something was wrong, that it didn’t make sense that you’d been ghosted, and so completely?
But the author, for me, did not have the writing chops to pull it off.
The first half of the novel was packed with tedious filler, and man, it was some of the most pedestrian writing I’ve seen in a long time. The author seemed to me to have never met an adverb or adjective, a simile or metaphor, she didn’t like. The only reason I did not DNF is that I did, in fact, want to know what happened to the missing Eddie, and I did not want to just peek at the end.
Thank goodness, the writing improved in the second half of the (approximately) 340-page book. And the story became more interesting.
I have to hand it to the author–she tried every trick in the book to make the mystery seem more compelling than I think it actually was. So you have the story told through shifting points of view, and the chapters jump around from the present to the past and then back (which didn’t really work for me). And there is a fair amount of misdirection, though some of this was clumsily done, leaving me annoyed with the author’s reliance on this plot device instead of impressed with her cleverness.
IMO, this story would have worked much better as a novella or a novel of maybe 200 pages, max. Get rid of some–most–of the side characters and their uninteresting plot lines. Focus on the “mystery” more. Tighten up the pacing, and this might have been a more compelling read.
Overall, I think I’ll stick to romance. :-)
Glad you thought this one wasn’t too bad, though not perfect. I would’ve chopped out the Jo and Tommy affair stuff, myself.