The Tremendous Power of Book Love IS a great blog title, Jason. Perhaps that could be the subtitle of my autobiography??

My quest to read all the works of Elizabeth Flock continued on my weekend car ride with "Everything Must Go."

It's the story of Henry Powell, a high school football hero whose promising future fizzles. He finds himself stuck as a clerk in a small-town departments store still dreaming of his future still crushed by guilt and family demands.

Flock's Henry is to be pitied.

Over and over as the novel leaps back and forth in time from his high school days to his middle age to his childhood and in between, he chooses to stay stuck.

Do we do the same?

Do we have internal conversations about what we are going to do and how we are going to change our lives, only to keep sabotaging those moves?

Do we get stuck in a time warp, not realizing how quickly life is passing us by?

Henry sure does.

After a failed relationship, he obsesses over what went wrong. After months he works up the nerve to call her, and she cuts it short. Then there's a chance meeting at the department store.

""You never called me back that time I called you. You said you were just going out for about an hour to run and do something and I waited and you never called me back."
Her mouth drops open.
...
"Oh, my God, Henry. That was almost six years ago, she says.
She pulls her purse in closer to her body. "Oh my God.""

Those six wasted years are par for the course in Henry's life.

As in her other works, Flock has created characters that are easy to connect with.

And I can't wait for more.

- Tricia Ambrose