What Alice Forgot: Good Fluff 'n Trash™ or Just Fluff?

 I am a fan of Fluff 'n Trash™. I love Penny Vincenzi, Janet Evanovich and select other writers who offer stories with a light touch. However, along with a light touch, their stories offer substance: characters make sense and act logically within the story. The narrative matches tone and focus. Without these elements in tight control, readers encounter too much froth, and the entire thing falls apart.

Lianne Moriarty is too frothy for this reader. I got as far as the secret in The Husband's Secret and put the book down. How could I care about such a dire, stressful situation if the characters felt so insubstantial and offered an almost flippant response? Reading the book made me feel as if I was eating cotton candy when I needed a heaping pile of macaroni and cheese. The author skated across the top, not investing in the characters or the story, just telling it.

I gave Moriarty a second try with What Alice Forgot, which I thought had a brilliant premise: a woman loses a decade of her memory, retreating to a time in her life before — well, before her life began, in her head. When fainted at the gym during a workout, she awoke thinking she was a decade younger and four months pregnant with her first child. It was a golden time in her life.

Within a decade, her life was completely different. She was completely different. However, everyone hoped her memory lapse was temporary, so they didn't have to tell her how different. Also, no one seemed to like her very much, or care enough about her to truly listen to her and tell her the truth. Alice was living in the past until the present elbowed it out of the way.

What Alice forgot was significant, but the tease to get there grew tedious quickly. Why is her sister so distant? Why does her husband's assistant speak to her so rudely? Why is everyone so dismissive of her memory loss? How many times can wrong suppositions be applied to broken relationships? It's like in the movie Twister, when everyone grows quiet at the mention of a Category 5 cyclone: it's overly dramatic and leaves the audience feeling like fools for not knowing.

Thankfully, Alice is not the only resource for memory and information. Frannie is writing letters to an unnamed recipient and Elisabeth has to keep a journal for her psychiatrist; these are interspersed through the narrative and offers welcome substance to the story.

Moriarty offers an almost Jekyll and Hyde comparison of Alice-29 and Alice-39, and neither bode well. The younger Alice is doe-eyed and innocent, almost an older version of her pre-teen daughter. As readers learn more about Alice-39 through Alice's friends, family and daily calendar, the question becomes, "What happened?" The difference is very stark, almost too much so.

I would have liked to see more of Alice-39 after she regained her memory, especially pertaining to any conflict she felt or enacted and the reactions of those in her life (aside from her men). Also, Moriarty actually pissed me off with the red herring regarding Elisabeth, which was cheap and very unfair to readers.

Although I am not inclined to recommend What Alice Forgot to my fellow readers, I will not dissuade them from reading it. There is an excellent value in contemplating a life lived versus a life intended, and many reader find themselves pondering their own lives, measuring their previous trajectory from their landing place. I would not be surprised if more than a few people made important changes to try to recapture their past persona, or to put themselves back on the path they thought they were on in the first place.

What did you think of What Alice Forgot? Do you like Moriarty? Would you recommend a particular book of hers? Let me know!