Book Review: What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

what_alice_forgot_coverTitle : What Alice Forgot
Author : Liane Moriarty
Publication date : 16th January 2014
Publisher : Penguin
Purchase eBook: Kindle
Purchase paper book: Amazon
Rating : 5 out of 5 LeeLee’s!

Alice is twenty-nine. She adores sleep, chocolate, and her ramshackle new house. She’s newly engaged to the wonderful Nick and is pregnant with her first baby.

There’s just one problem. All of that was ten years ago .

Alice has slipped in a step-aerobics class, hit her head and lost a decade. Now she’s a grown-up, bossy mother of three in the middle of a nasty divorce and her beloved sister Elisabeth isn’t speaking to her. This is her life but not as she knows it.

Clearly Alice has made some terrible mistakes. Just how much can happen in a decade?

Can she ever get back to the woman she used to be?

Liane Moriarty is the bestselling author of five novels, Three WishesThe Last AnniversaryWhat Alice ForgotThe Hypnotist’s Love Story and most recently the top ten bestseller The Husband’s Secret, as well as the Space Brigade series for children. She lives in Sydney with her husband and son.

My Thoughts

Did you love The Husbands secret? Do you Miss the sheer suspense of never knowing what was going to happen next and where the story would lead? Well Liane Moriarty has done it again!

What Alice Forgot, originally published in 2010 has been reissued in the UK for your reading pleasure. You’d be a fool to miss out, I can’t believe I hadn’t read this sooner. After reading Lianes most recently written novel and best seller ‘The Husbands Secret‘ last year I instantly had high expectations and Liane delivered.

Waking up on the gym floor 29 year old happily married and recently pregnant Alice Love doesn’t know where she is, she doesn’t even go to the gym and she certainly doesn’t like the idea of having been to one! Thats exactly how I feel every time I’m at the gym, I am not a gym person why on earth am I here? Alice and myself were on similar terms right from the start.

Imagine losing ten years of your life, would it be like having a clean slate? Would those around you forgive and forget for all those horrible things you did or said over the years? Could you handle not being able to remember your own children or how many you even had? Thats what happened to Alice.

After her ‘bump on the noggin’ a Doctor who Alice chooses to call George Clooney, due to his handsome looks, whisks her off in a ambulance. Surely everything would come back to her once she’d been looked at and had an evenings rest, even if they did wake her every hour to ask her the same questions over and over… But what if it didn’t?

Alice can’t seem to fathom why her husband is being so blooming nasty to her, or why her sister isn’t speaking to her. She couldn’t even remember what the names of her own children were! She only knows she has them due to finding a photograph in a purse, and until she found the drivers license with her name on she wasn’t even sure it was hers.

The thing I loved about this is the way Liane Moriarty managed to piece together the whole novel, constantly referring to the past in which Alice feels like she still lives in, all while jumping to the present where everything and everyone has changed dramatically over the last ten years. The story is told from the perspective of each character, from love letters being read aloud to blog posts by her grandmother and the combination works really well.

Throughout the novel you feel like you have been placed very much in Alice’s shoes, their is nothing to give away anything of what Alice has forgotten and this only makes you want to know more, it felt like I was channeling some of the frustration Alice was feeling and when something comes back to her everything slowly starts to make sense and click together.

Would I recommend it?

This book didn’t disappoint and I’d certainly recommend it to others, Liane Moriarty has managed to write yet another book that I can only describe as being a gripping and thought provoking novel. I’d expected nothing less.

Just like The Husbands Secret I wouldn’t put this book in the category of standard Women’s Fiction like so many do, its much more than that, a deep meaning piece of writing that makes you stop and think of how these events would affect your life if it were to happen to you. Its not all serious though the whole novel is topped with the quirky Aussie slang found in all of her books and humour flowing throughout.

I was totally invested in this novel from start to finish and haven’t contemplated over anything so much in a very long time. A perfect read to get absolutely lost in, you’ll come up for air feeling much appreciation for the people in your life and even the little things that we all take for granted. Gripping, thought-provoking and funny, a literal laugh and cry kind of read.

Many thanks to the wonderful Katie Sheldrake at Penguin UK Books for a copy of this superb novel, and thanks to Liane Moriarty for another fabulous read.

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