Rachel Carrington, With Love from Sam

With Love from Sam

Rachel Carrington

Five Star, Dec 2005, $26.95, 212 pp.

ISBN 15914415x

Karyn and Jace Morgan were very much in love and totally delighted with their two-year-old son Sam, but their marriage crumbled when their child died in a car accident while Karyn was driving. Jace spends his nights getting drunk and holding his feelings to himself. Karyn tries to move on by visiting Sam's grave. In a drunken stupor Jace blames Sam's death on his wife because he believes she was driving too fast on a stormy night: Karyn kicks him out.

Although both love each other, neither knows how to find their way back to each other. When Karyn sees Sam in his bed, she believes she saw a ghost. She learns she is pregnant but doesn't tell Jace, and that is when her late grandmother Joline Wetherford comes to tell Karyn that Sam sent her to plead with her to try to save her marriage. Jace has a hard time believing that Sam and Joline appeared to Karyn. Now that Karyn is ready to take Jace back, she know he will resist when he learns she is pregnant but didn't tell him.

Rachel Carrington has written a very intense and deep family drama with paranormal "marriage counselors" that has some light-hearted moments, but is not a typical romance, because it deals with a broken relationship and their way back to one another. Readers will cry for them, laugh with them, and hope they come to terms with their feelings and grief. This is a potent reading experience.

Harriet Klausner