Book Spotlight: Love, Carry My Bags by C.R. Everett

Welcome author C.R. Everett! She's here to share a little bit about her novel, Love, Carry My Bags.

Camryn Johnson’s world is turned upside down when long lost love, Reese Dahlgren, re-enters her life at a pivotal point in her already challenging marriage. She faces an excruciating predicament: choose between a broken home for her daughter or a broken life for herself.

After her parents' divorce, Camryn first meets high school basketball star, Reese, at the Harvard Milk Day Festival bed races. Reese hides baggage of his own…until Camryn melts his heart and learns secrets entrusted only to her. Still, the weight is too much to bear. Unable to cope, Reese unwittingly backs Camryn into a corner during his air force enlistment—love him from afar, or leave him.

Enter aerospace engineering student, Glenn Conroy. Persistent and savvy, he woos Camryn during her junior year of college and wins her heart. Or does he? When Reese re-enters her life, further disrupting her tenuous marriage, Camryn turns to best friend, Megan, for advice, but refuses to believe Megan’s suggestion that she’s caught in a “simple” love triangle.

Camryn unveils hidden mysteries and secrets as she embarks on a life-changing journey of revelation and forgiveness, transcending doormat qualities inherited from her mother, and in the process finds what life's struggles are really all about.

C.R. Everett's heart-wrenching debut novel takes the reader on an emotion-packed journey that lingers long after the last page is turned.


Purchase Love, Carry My Bags on Amazon!

Find C.R. Everett on her website, blog, Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads. 


And now an excerpt from Love, Carry My Bags.... 

“I don’t mean to be rude, but, when are you going home?” Mr. Dahlgren asked. Reese and I smiled at each other, slightly embarrassed.

“Reese goes back on Sunday. I’ll take him to the airport for you,” I said, expressing the favor.

“Oh, Reese needs a ride?” He said in a deadpan drawl. “I thought he might walk. That’s what those service boys do, right? Walk a lot? Hut two three four.”

Reese wasn’t amused.

“You’re drunk again! No wonder mom left you!” Reese shouted. He took a whiff of Mr. Dahlgren’s drink, a cup from Subway, then poured it down the sink.

“Wha’d ya go and waste a good rum and Coke for?”

“You’re the waste!” Reese left me and his dad in the kitchen and ran upstairs. I looked at the stairway, then looked at Mr. Dahlgren, not sure if I should leave the drunk man alone or run to comfort Reese.

Mr. Dahlgren made my decision for me, waving me away. “Git.”

Reese was lying face down on his bed, his head buried in the pillow. I crept in. Instinctively, I touched his shoulders as I sat next to him, quiet, not sure what to say.

“I wish you wouldn’t have seen that.” He sniffed away some tears.

“I didn’t know . . .”

“Nobody knows. I didn’t want you to know.”

“What are people going to think of me? Son of a drunk.”

“But you’re not like that. You’re not like him.”

Reese continued. “It’s one of the reasons I wanted to leave this place, get out of this town, so I wouldn’t have to deal with him. I’m sorry you saw me angry. You don’t want to see me angry.”

“You had a right to feel that way,” I said, trying my best to be supportive. “It’s okay.” Alcoholism wasn’t something I was intimate with. We held each other, the only answer we knew.

Mr. Dahlgren, stumbling up the stairs, broke the sound of silence. He uttered, “Aw, shit.” A tumbling noise and a thud suggested he missed a step and fell back down. We heard him drag himself back up the stairs. His bedroom door clicked shut. Muffled sounds of a flop on his bed followed. The bedsprings squeaked, and then nothing.

Thanks so much for stopping by C.R.!