What Alice Forgot

By: Liane Moriarty

My Rating: 5 stars

Who Should Read This?: Fans of Liane Moriarty will love this book. Anyone who may have read her other books I think will enjoy this light read, especially since her other books, in my opinion, tend to be on the more serious side. My mother actually read this and recommended it for a fun read. It is a quick read and would actually be a perfect summer read when you are feeling lazy and maybe laying on a beach somewhere.

Synopsis (From Goodreads): Alice Love is twenty-nine, crazy about her husband, and pregnant with her first child. So imagine Alice’s surprise when she comes to on the floor of a gym and is whisked off to the hospital where she discovers the honeymoon is truly over — she’s getting divorced, she has three kids and she’s actually 39 years old. Alice must reconstruct the events of a lost decade, and find out whether it’s possible to reconstruct her life at the same time. She has to figure out why her sister hardly talks to her, and how is it that she’s become one of those super skinny moms with really expensive clothes.
Ultimately, Alice must discover whether forgetting is a blessing or a curse, and whether it’s possible to start over.

My Thoughts:

I was hesitant to start this book before my mom insisted I read it. As I mentioned previously I feel like Moriarty can write some depressing stuff, and this book sounded complicated. Though it does have its moments when you sit back and reflect on the hardships all of the characters are going, the protagonist Alice kind of provides comic relief. Moriarty really got me thinking about how crazy it would be to wake up and be missing a decade of memory. I don’t have children, but I can only imagine how difficult it would be to wake up thinking you were pregnant with your first child, only to find out you actually had 3 children. One of the things I really enjoyed about Alice was that even though she was going through this tremendously stressful situation, she still kept such a positive attitude. I don’t know if I would have been able to do that. Furthermore, we find out quite early in the book that Alice has changed quite a bit in the last decade. Except she doesn’t realize she has, so she goes back to having the beliefs and personality of her old self. I thought it was a brilliant idea for Moriarty to add this because the reader than gets to go through the journey with Alice kind of coming back into her own, learning she made mistakes, and also learning how she got to this new her. It reminded me how much people can change over time.

Like other Moriarty books, this one jumps from character to character point of views. Sometimes I really loathe when authors do this, but Moriarty does a good job in keeping the flow of the book going. Characters revealed the answers to questions that Alice could not tell the reader because of her memory loss, so by giving the point of views from other characters it really rounded out the storyline and added depth to the book. It reminded me that there are two sides to a story, and that although on the surface people may seem to be handling life, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is true.

What Alice Forgot really surprised me, and it was different from other books that I have been reading, which was refreshing. It is a fast book for being a little bit of a longer book, and the character development was well done. I really enjoyed the topic of memory loss as well because it really got me thinking how that would affect one’s life, and was equally as impressed that the author could keep it relatively light hearted with a topic that could easily be morbid. I truly recommend this book to everyone because I think anyone can learn something from this. From reading this book I definitely learned to appreciate my loved ones more and realized that no matter how complicated life gets, we need to remember to be there for the ones who matter the most to us.