Lily's Ghost by Cheryl Drake Harris

First of all...I've been very lackadaisical about posting my recent reads. I actually finished this book about a week ago but just haven't had the gumption to post about it...most likely because it was only okay.

So this book is about a woman, who, after becoming a doctor in the early 1970s, decides to enlist in the army to go to Vietnam in order to use her expertise to try and save some lives. The novel follows the aftermath and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) that the main character suffers from after returning home. Five years after returning from the war, she's married to a man she never really loved but more importantly she is mother to a boy who helps her maintain the strength that keeps her sane. Eventually, her flashbacks and panic attacks lead her husband to an extra-marital affair and subsequent divorce and custody fight. The story is basically one woman's struggle to find a way out of her past experiences and her fight at not letting the war she can't seem to forget from taking her son away forever.

This book was only okay. There was a ton of back and forth between Vietnam and her present day. I was engrossed in the custody fight part and the PTSD issues she suffered from but the parts where she remembered back to her Vietnam experience bored me. It didn't seem to have a place in the novel and mostly I read the first sentence of those paragraphs and quickly skipped on to the "good part". I will say that the writer did a great job at getting the reader "mad" at the philandering and unfair husband while at the same time seeing the need for the main character to get some much needed therapy. The characters, however, were poorly developed (other than the main character) and the inclusion of new story lines that didn't seem to have a point or never had a reason for being in the book left this reader floundering. In essence, I say, don't waste your time with this one.