Abandoned by Booklikes

I seriously need to find some books to enjoy soon. Between this one and "Lair of Dreams" I pretty much despaired through Saturday. "Ghosted" just doesn't work. It doesn't lean in enough to the mystery or romance portions. At times Walsh seems like she was in the middle of writing a romantic suspense book, but pulled it back. Also, the two characters, Sarah and Eddie are bland and have zero chemistry together. I also had some thoughts about Sarah acting like a loon (there is no other word for it) throughout this book over a guy she had sex with for seven days. If she was younger (in her 20s) I could have just went with it, but she's almost 40 and going away weeping and running cause she lost the love of her life. I maybe screeched get a grip at the 50 percent mark.

"Ghosted" starts off with Sarah and Eddie on their last day together. Sarah is worried about seeing Eddie again and vice versa. It's a long road to get there, but it eventually comes out that Sarah lives in California and is only in England visiting family. Eddie, is about to go off on a vacation with friends, so they promise to call each other when he's back in town so they can figure this thing out. My comment was, figure out what? You live an ocean apart, get real. It also dribbles out these two nitwits didn't even talk about their personal lives with each other. Sarah also lies that she's divorced (no separated) and they are both content thinking true love's dream or something.

Fast forward to Sarah not hearing from Eddie and growing increasingly frantic. Two of her best friends are just eh, you had a holiday fling, keep it moving. Sarah though knows that what she and Eddie has was real and proceeds to stalk (yes she does) him through social media, his friend's social media, and even follows one of his friends to a football match hoping Eddie would be there. She's unhinged enough to make me wish that this had ended with Eddie getting a restraining order. I think that what bugs me the most about this, is that if the genders were flipped this would be unacceptable. Point blank, this is unacceptable, I don't care if you are male or female. Getting ghosted sucks, it doesn't give you carte blanche to stalk people. 

To make matters worse, Sarah thinks about going back to Eddie's house to see if he is there, (I can't recall if she does that) but then proceeds to write him letters telling him about her life. I am still trying to see the romance in this book, cause it's not hitting any of my romance receptors at all.

The other characters in this book are given short shrift since we are just following Sarah along as she obsesses and cries over Eddie. Her friends problems are not as important as figuring out the mystery of why Eddie ghosted her. And what gets me, is that it is alluded to and then point blank pointed out how bad things are with some of her friends lives. Jo is with a terrible guy. Her friend Jenni has fertility problems. Sarah has an estranged husband with a new girlfriend that you would think she would be more focused on than Eddie. 

As other reviewers had pointed out, the whole obsession after 7 days makes zero sense. If these two had been dating for months or years it would have worked better. However, Walsh has to set it up as a short time in order for the twists that follow to work. Frankly, if you are just hell-bent on setting up a twist instead of writing a good book, it just makes me liken you to "Girl on a Train" and will cause me to avoid your books in the future. 

The writing was not good. I think another reviewer pointed out that Walsh overly decribes scenery in every scene and she does. I don't care about grass that much. I don't need to hear all of the colors it can be described, along with the smells, etc. The flow was awful. When the book switches POV things really grinded to a halt. After we switch I was ready for the second twist and was glad that I called it correctly. Too bad, if Walsh had shaken things up, that would have saved the book for me. 

The ending was just a meh moment. It doesn't make sense based on what we as readers know. The people going on about this being a great romance made me scratch my head. Sure it's a great romance if we want to pretend that people would have a totally different reaction than what Walsh shows here which is love conquers all.