I bought this looking for something fluffy for a plane ride and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
I mean really, amnesia? That’s such an old horse that there’s nothing left to beat, it’s done, it’s over, even soap operas are tired of it.
But while no one is nominating Moriarty for a Pulitzer, this was a much better book than one could have expected from the synopsis. I’m lucky I bought it on name recognition and dove right in; I had no clue what it was about and got to experience the horror of jumping ahead a decade in your own life along with our protagonist. You understand the changes in your own life over years by reflection, but it’s another thing entirely to say “22 year old Hayley would be horrified to learn I’m married with a baby,” and another thing to think how terrified that 22 year old would be to learn that pediatrics led her to want a baby with that guy she just broke up with and then married, to say nothing of the ups and downs in our relationship since.
For our heroine the horror is seeing how her comfortable life and marriage have gone off the rails in a decade while having no memory of anything but happiness. Amnesia in bad fiction is always played for a narrative device, Moriarty does a fine job of taking the reader along for the ride with the protagonist of being adrift in ones own life without the middle aged ennui that would entail without the memory loss hook.
Midway through my third Moriarty book but so far this is my favorite.