Book Review: What Alice Forgot

Alice Love is 29 years old, married to the love of her life Nick, having just purchased an old fixer-upper of a house and is pregnant with the couple's first child. Then, she wakes up on the floor of a gym after having passed out and realizes that she's actually 39, with three kids and in the process of divorcing Nick. She remembers nothing of the last 10 years of her life.

We follow Alice as she puts the pieces back together: how her marriage fell apart; why she's suddenly this supermom volunteering at everything, planning every single minute of the day, alienating her neighbors with rezoning plans; the reason why her close relationship with her sister Elisabeth has crumbled; and why her oldest child, the one she was pregnant with 10 years ago, is so miserable and moody. She doesn't really like who she has become and starts to work toward making things right with everyone: Nick, Elisabeth, Madison, even her neighbors. Then she gets her memory back.

I wanted to like this book. I thought the story was an interesting one and it was a quick and easy read. But it didn't deliver the way I had hoped. There were two storylines that got almost the same amount of attention as Alice's memory - the infertility woes of Elisabeth and her husband and the newfound lovelife of Alice's adopted grandmother - that seemed pointless and didn't really add to the main plot. I found the young Alice, supposedly the picture of youth and energy and sweetness, to be a pushover. When she learns of her impending divorce, her immediate thoughts of what she has done to alienate Nick (her bad breath? her insistence that he bring her tea in the morning?), as though it were impossible for him to also be at fault. And I found older Alice to be a selfish jerk.

[SPOILER ALERT] The part that annoyed me the most, however, was the end. If there was a more perfect, tie-me-up-in-a-bow ending, I couldn't think of it. Alice gets her memory back. She embraces the good parts of both her young and old self - still health-conscious but not health-obsessed, still involved with the kids' school and activities but not leading the charge on all things. She gets back together with Nick, becomes close with Elisabeth again and solves all of Madison's emotional issues. LIFE IS WONDERFUL. EVERYONE LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER.

Like I said, I liked the idea. I liked imagining what me at age 18 would think of my 28-year-old life and I liked imagining what I would think about my life at age 38. I saw a lot of myself in both young and old Alice, but both ends of the spectrum were too much like cartoon characters. I know people change but that much? They were practically different species.