Monthly Archives September 2009

~~”Touching, tender and gentle, the moments between father and son in When You Went Away pull at the heartstrings and the tear ducts.” 

Gerry is our unlikely hero in When You Went Away, a novel by Michael Baron, published by The Story Plant, a relatively new and different sort of publisher, operated by publishing industry veterans. I received an advanced reading copy of When You Went Away for review, and it appealed to me: I liked the cover, the concept of the novel from the blurb. Because of these two things, I bumped this book up in my review queue. Hey, even reviewers like to read for pleasure now and then.

I wasn’t disappointed with When You Went Away, either, so I was glad I bumped it up, but I will say it wasn’t exactly written as I expected it. First, the book is told in a near-memoir style, even though it’s a fiction novel, and the reader gets to go along with Gerry, our protagonist, on his journey of surviving after both his wife and daughter leave him—his wife through death, and his teen daughter through running away from home.

Left to raise a near-newborn son, alone, Gerry has to learn how to live again. He was young when he married, and had been married for the majority of his adult life, and now he’s a single father to Reese, the unplanned but much wanted child born just month prior to Maureen’s death.

Finding support ...

It was a good night, a quiet night, a peaceful night, when she fell asleep, at an unusually reasonable hour for her habits. It was much needed sleep, as anyone who knew her would surely tell you. What started out peacefully, full of wondrous dreams and silent comforts soon turning into a nightmare in Wasabi’s Revenge…

We catch up with our hapless heroine at 2:58 in the morning, Texas time, approximately 15 minutes after a startling realization: she shouldn’t have eaten half a canister of wasabi-coated dry peas just minutes before falling asleep in bed.

Let’s listen in:

“Well, I knew I shouldn...