This is going to be short and sweet. I loved this book. It was absolutely what I needed to read right now. A great romance with two compelling leads. The fact that the author didn’t try to magically heal stuff through the power of love. You get to see Molly and Aster before (at least up to what she remembers) and then where they are now (married with Molly dealing with amnesia). This is a great second chance romance that doesn’t do the typical set up and I loved it. Great secondary characters too which I would love to see in future works. And the ending. Ahh, the ending. We get a great HEA and it not only feels earned, you feel so happy with it when you get to the end.
Once, Again, Always follows Molly Graham. She wakes up in the hospital confused on how she got there and horrified when she finds out she has lost the last six years of her life, she is now 27 about to turn 28, and she’s married to her arch-nemesis from boarding school, Aster Bishop. Molly and her medical team don’t know what caused her to have a series of strokes which caused her to lose her memory, but now she has to go home with a man she doesn’t know or love. And she is dealing with her two best friends (Alannah and Roy) being happily married with kids and who know how much she loves Aster and pressure her to just go home and give it a try. And the book follows Molly as she does try to see what could have caused her to fall for Aster, try to get her memories back, and then just realize she may never get that.
I loved how Gayle slowly unspools the love story of Molly and Aster. The before chapters we get (in italics btw) you can see he was kind of awful, but at times, so was she. And then you see the older him and how much he loves Molly and just seems to worship the ground she walks on. With her friends and his (the friend group in this book was great) pushing them together and wanting things to go back to what they were before, you get why Molly at times is overwhelmed and doesn’t know what she wants.
I did love though that this book does not rush things. You go through several seasons with Molly and Aster and then a year later epilogue. And I absolutely love that Gayle does not wrap up every storyline from this book in the end.
