Page Turners – March 2023 review

In March Page Turners met to discuss ‘What Alice Forgot’, a 2009 novel by Australian author Liane Moriarty. We found this to be an interesting book, with realistic characters.

Alice wakes up on the floor of the gym with a bump on her head, thinking she’s still a fun-loving young woman with a loving husband and pregnant with their first baby. But she soon discovers that she has lost ten years from her memory! She can’t remember giving birth to her three children and she’s puzzled why her husband seems to hate her. She also can’t imagine what she has done to upset her sister, who will hardly speak to her, as they had always been so close.

We thought it was a clever idea, with well-developed characters and an engrossing plot. We all enjoyed the book and found it an easy read. We liked the way the first-person journal by Alice’s sister Elizabeth and the first-person blog by adopted grandmother Frannie sat alongside the third person story line of Alice and enabled us to see the development of the plot from different points of view.

Despite being an easy read, it gave us some interesting themes to discuss. It was an eye opener about how we transform as people with each new age. How many of our lives have developed in ways that might have surprised our younger selves? Alice had the opportunity to revisit the choices she had made and finally her family got the happy ending we hoped for, although the author kept us guessing right to the very end about which way things would go.

We recommend this book to you.

Deborah Wallis