What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

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?

One of the memorable books that I read last year was The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty, which I adored and was so popular it was one of Richard and Judy’s Autumn Book Club Pick for 2013. Penguin are now re-releasing What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty which was originally released back in 2010 but the new re-issue release date is 16^th January and I have just finished reading my copy and it was fantastic.

After having a fall in her step aerobics class, Alice hit her head and now seems have lost ten years of her life. She believes she is still only twenty nine and that she is pregnant. She soon finds out that not only has a number of things changed in her life but that she has completely changed too but not necessarily for the better. As the people around her try and help her to get her memory back, will her old memories return and will she approve of the woman she has become.

This book was not what I was expecting at all. I thought the book was going to be a little chilling but it is far from that it is a great entertaining light read that I could not put down. The story is told from Alice’s point of view which works well as we discover things as she does so we can connect with the situation more. In addition to Alice’s point of view there are also blog entries from Frannie and homework entries from her sister Elizabeth. I really enjoyed reading Elizabeth’s entries as I loved her character just as much if not slightly more than Alice, and reading her entries gives us a little peak on certain previous parts of Alice’s life and how they effected Elizabeth.

I loved how unpredictable the part about Gina was, it was quite obvious that something significant had happened to do with Gina that had a massive impact on Alice’s life but I couldn’t predict what it was so the author was very clever keeping us guessing. There were no low points in this book my interest was held the whole way through.

I really didn’t like the sound of the new Alice and I was eager to see what could have happened in her life to make her such a hard, cold and bitter woman. The children and Nick are all wonderful characters that help to make this book an even more enjoyable read.

I love this book just as much as The Husband’s Secret they are just very different books but both show the author’s brilliant writing style. I would definitely recommend this book.