What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty

This is one of those books where I am not sure if I really loved it or if I really disliked it. It’s fair to say I enjoyed it for the most part but I found it very difficult keeping a lot of things straight in my mind – especially the timeframe. The novel takes place over quite a short space of time but because of the amount of stuff that takes places it often feels longer and therefore keeping track of just where in time you are supposed to be is quite difficult. In addition to this the fact that most of the novel feels rather dragged out makes the ending feel quite sudden – the bits at the end where her memory comes back all at once does seem to happen to quickly almost as if the author realised the book was running long and had to quickly get to her conclusion. I was also more than a little shocked by the man that Alice actually chose - because after getting her memory back it seemed, to me, pretty obvious that she wasn’t going to go that way.


I also found myself rather disappointed with the whole Gina reveal. From the early information relating to her character I suspected that Gina had tried to change Alice and manipulate her – in a sort of abusive relationship. So it was a surprise to find that the reality was rather different from that.

I found the scenes with Alice and the children to be some of the most interesting although I did find the Olivia character rather trying. She was just too perfect and so I found Madison to be far more interesting. The beach scenes were a great read although I think even an amnesiac parent would know that isn’t the greatest of punishments (or even a punishment at all).

This book did make me think though about how I would feel in Alice’s position – to forget 10 years of your life. This is a rather scary prospect and it is a great idea for a book but I think maybe the timeframe should have been a little longer to make things feel less dragged out.

I also found it a little bizarre how Alice’s stuff was written in the third person while Elisabeth and Franny were given first person dialogue in the form of their ‘homework’ and blog respectively. These bits were sometimes a bit distracting and sometimes confused me more than was needed – such as making the relationship between Alice and Elisabeth seem worse when Elisabeth wrote about it.

One interesting thing I did learn though is that the author, Liane Moriarty, is the sister of Jaclyn Moriarty who wrote the Ashbury / Brookfield books (Feeling Sorry for Celia, Finding Cassie Crazy etc.).