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mybooks_maryreads 's review for:
What Alice Forgot
by Liane Moriarty
I didn’t like this one as well as The Hypnotist’s Love Story, though the writing style is the same – engaging, interesting characters with a seemingly true-to-life inner dialogue going on. In fact, I read almost the entire book in about three days.
The basic plot element, that Alice loses her memory, is given away in the title so I’m not spoiling anything there. After losing her memory, Alice has to reconcile the state of her current life with the “self” of many years ago existing in it. Central to this is her relationship with her sister and her husband. It is riveting.
However, the book was too long. First, there was an unnecessary side-story of Alice’s adopted Grandmother’s love letters to her deceased fiancé. I didn’t think it added much, if anything, to the story, and just served to drag out the main plot.
The story just falls apart at the end in my opinion. From here, spoiler alert! you have been warned.
Alice finally gets her memory back, and we find out just where things went wrong in her marriage. She had changed, and her husband Nick had changed. Having kids and a career changed them. Relationships with others changed them. And they are now bitter towards one another. When this happens on page 384, one thinks: how could this possibly get resolved in the remaining pages? Well, it can’t, really.
Moriarty just zips through Alice remembering the last 10 years of her life. And that’s okay. It makes sense, and Alice decides to go through with the divorce, and they end up being amicable. It’s a satisfying enough ending. Then Moriarty just ruins it with a sappy Epilogue in which suddenly Alice and Nick are back together.
It’s just totally ridiculous and unbelievable, after all that they have been through, after the building up of years of resentment and bitterness, after each of them has moved on to new partners and even living with the new partner, that they would get back together again. If this was the point of the novel, I think Moriarty should have spent another 150 pages chronicling the process of Nick and Alice falling in love again. Which she could have done if she would have cut some of the detritus out of the first 400 pages.
The basic plot element, that Alice loses her memory, is given away in the title so I’m not spoiling anything there. After losing her memory, Alice has to reconcile the state of her current life with the “self” of many years ago existing in it. Central to this is her relationship with her sister and her husband. It is riveting.
However, the book was too long. First, there was an unnecessary side-story of Alice’s adopted Grandmother’s love letters to her deceased fiancé. I didn’t think it added much, if anything, to the story, and just served to drag out the main plot.
The story just falls apart at the end in my opinion. From here, spoiler alert! you have been warned.
Alice finally gets her memory back, and we find out just where things went wrong in her marriage. She had changed, and her husband Nick had changed. Having kids and a career changed them. Relationships with others changed them. And they are now bitter towards one another. When this happens on page 384, one thinks: how could this possibly get resolved in the remaining pages? Well, it can’t, really.
Moriarty just zips through Alice remembering the last 10 years of her life. And that’s okay. It makes sense, and Alice decides to go through with the divorce, and they end up being amicable. It’s a satisfying enough ending. Then Moriarty just ruins it with a sappy Epilogue in which suddenly Alice and Nick are back together.
It’s just totally ridiculous and unbelievable, after all that they have been through, after the building up of years of resentment and bitterness, after each of them has moved on to new partners and even living with the new partner, that they would get back together again. If this was the point of the novel, I think Moriarty should have spent another 150 pages chronicling the process of Nick and Alice falling in love again. Which she could have done if she would have cut some of the detritus out of the first 400 pages.