What Alice Forgot

I just can't seem to forget about Alice.

She's a friend of mine.

Sort of.

I mean, I think she and I would be friends.

That is, if we'd ever met one another.

Which we can never really do, exactly, because...

Alice lives in Australia and mostly because...

Alice isn't real.

She seems real to me though, because she's the main character in one of the most wonderful books I've read this year. I finished reading What Alice Forgot way back in April and I'm still thinking about Alice and her family.

From the back cover:

Alice love is twenty-nine, crazy about her husband, Nick, and pregnant with their first child. So imagine Alice's surprise when she comes to on the floor of a gym (she HATES the gym!) and is whisked off to the hospital, where she discovers the honeymoon is truly over:  She is actually thirty-nine years old, has three kids, and is getting divorced.

That knock on her head has misplaced ten years. Now Alice must piece together the events of the lost decade and find out if it's possible to reconstruct her life at the same time. She needs to figure out why her sister hardly talks to her and how it is that she's become one of those super skinny moms with really expensive clothes. Ultimately, Alice must discover whether forgetting is a blessing or a curse--and how to start over... 

What Alice Forgot kept popping up in my sights last summer and when Tsh Oxenrider of SimpleMom.net listed it as one of her favorite books, I added it to my "To Be Read in 2013" list. I thought that it was going to be a fun, light read with a playful tone and on the surface it was until it became an out-loud-snicker-inducer and then ole Alice and her life and it's pitfalls and ponderings became very real to me. It turned out to be a very funny, very thoughtfully written, perfect for summer, perspective setting book and I think everyone or maybe every woman or at least every mother should have a go at it.

I handed Alice to a friend the day after I'd finished reading it because I needed to talk about it with someone and because I knew she'd like it as much as I did.

After beginning the book my friend texted "There are some bad words in this book." And there are, but not many, and they are for the purpose of establishing the characters in the early pages of the book...but do be forewarned. My friend said she'd just hold her ears when she read over the offending language which I thought that was a super idea.

A couple of days later, I was thinking about Alice and her family and I began wondering just how things were going for them just now and naturally, I reached for the phone and then laughed. I'd been about to text my friend and ask her how Alice was getting along, figuring of course, that my friend would know since she now possessed the book.

It's that good.



"Alice's journey of reconciling herself to how her life came to be what it is, and her slowly building understanding of how the threads of her marriage began to unravel, is moving, well-paced, and thoroughly pleasurable." ~ Publishers Weekly

"You won't be able to put this fun read down...It's about everything that matters: family, friends, marriage--and did I mention it's really funny?" ~Woman's World

Happy Reading!