“‘You know how you wanted them to say it out loud back then?’ Another breath. ‘I’ll say it now — we all wanted it to be you that died. You should have died in that tub.’”
Excerpt from Every­thing Must Go

The basic story is that Henry Powell is blamed for the ruin­ing of his family at the tender age of seven. After this life-​altering event, the family goes down hill. Mom devel­ops a Valium addic­tion, the older brother becomes angsty, and dad just dis­tances him­self from his feel­ings. I’m not giving away plot twists here, merely the story line. As a result Henry is bur­dened with the guilt of this, and spends his life trying to make it up to his par­ents. It’s sort of sad to see the pathetic pro­gres­sion of his life, or a lack thereof.

Every­thing Must Go is an easy read and doesn’t pro­vide much strain on the brain. This is sadly a double-​edged com­ment. What that means is that though easy to read, it is adversely not that intrigu­ing in its plot line. I got the gist of it about 150 pages in. It’s like the biz­zaro Rudy. It’s Rudy if he didn’t get into Notre Dame. All the sappy depres­sion, but no upswing at the end. It sort of just levels out on itself. Say you started at a happy scale of 5. the book brings you down to neg­a­tive ten, then man­ages to crawl back up to about a zero. The ending left me some­what deflated, though that comes down to per­sonal opinion.

I will admit its a sadly detailed look into the life of those who don’t quite make it. Those people that don’t make it out there and do some­thing with their lives. Not even any­thing extra­or­di­nary, but even those who go out and blend into the median. Henry is a char­ac­ter that sits out­side the bell curve, curs­ing it for its com­fort­able­ness and at times hol­ster­ing his guilt as a badge of honour. It’s a story about love and duty, no matter how mis­placed either must be. I appre­ci­ated that though depress­ing, Henry stands out as a man of his word above all else. He is a sad and simple man, but he is honest and truthful… even if that makes him sound like a psycho through­out some of the book.

Eliz­a­beth Flock also man­aged to incur in me one of the longest “cringe moments” of my life. In my Social Psych class, we were taught that men and women respond dif­fer­ently to the same sit­u­a­tion. For instance when some­one is doing a speech, and fail­ing hor­ri­bly at it, men will cringe and look away. Women tend to lean in and pay more atten­tion, trying to offer silent sup­port. It was this look-​away-​and-​cringe effect that flowed within me for about a third of the book, though at dif­fer­ing times. I can’t explain why, but anyone who reads this one through will understand.

It wasn’t a bad book, though I think I may have missed the point. I am also wary of any book that actu­ally comes with “discussion questions” in the back.

5.5/10