Alice Love is twenty-nine, crazy in love with her husband Nick, and pregnant with their first child. But when she faints and hits her head at spin class, she wakes up and discovers she is now thirty-nine, has three children, and she and Nick are getting divorced. Somehow, she has forgotten the last ten years of her life. Now Alice is struggling to figure out how she has changed in the last ten years, who these three kids are, and why she and Nick are separating. And will she ever get her memory back?
This book is written from the point of view of three women – Alice, her sister Elisabeth, and their grandmother Frannie. Elisabeth’s sections are written as journal entries to her therapist and Frannie’s are written as letters to her late fiance. I really liked this glimpse into the other characters in the novel and I thought it was an interesting way to introduce the innermost thoughts of secondary characters.
I’m not sure which version of Alice I liked better – the twenty-nine year old or the thirty-nine year old. Younger Alice was so full of hope and idealism. Older Alice was more cynical and hard. While I was sad to read how Alice had changed, you could see how it happened and how her real-life experiences had an effect on her. I did think the reactions of everyone around Alice and how they dealt with her memory loss were a bit odd at times. Everyone expected her to act just like her thirty-nine-year-old self when that wasn’t who she was. I actually found it a bit annoying in some parts that other characters just expected Alice to know who they were or know what their relationship was when it was clear that she had lost her memory.
A lot of this book is about self-revelation. Many of the characters contemplate how they got to where they are in their lives and how they changed in the past ten years. Alice wonders how she became this gym-loving super-parent and how Nick seems to have changed so much while Elisabeth is left trying to figure out how she became so miserable in her life. There were some fairly emotional scenes that left me thinking about how I have changed in the past ten years and how I might change in the future.
The plot of this book reminded me a lot of Remember Me? by Sophie Kinsella. I did not find this book to be especially funny or romantic and I did think it was a bit long. Still, I enjoyed all the thinking and reflecting it made me do.
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