Thursday, May 30, 2019

Love, Water, Memory by Jennie Shortridge

Love, Water, Memory by Jennie Shortridge
Published  April 2013 by Gallery Books
Source: my copy purchased for my Nook

Publisher's Summary:
If you could do it all over again, would you still choose him?If you could do it all over again, would you still choose him?

At age thirty-nine, Lucie Walker has no choice but to start her life over when she comes to, up to her knees in the chilly San Francisco Bay, with no idea how she got there or who she is. Her memory loss is caused by an emotional trauma she knows nothing about, and only when handsome, quiet Grady Goodall arrives at the hospital does she learn she has a home, a career, and a wedding just two months away. What went wrong? Grady seems to care for her, but Lucie is no more sure of him than she is of anything. As she collects the clues of her past self, she unlocks the mystery of what happened to her. The painful secrets she uncovers could hold the key to her future—if she trusts her heart enough to guide her.

My Thoughts:
Jennie Shortridge writes chick lit with depth and heart. Yes, they are love stories. Yes, you will have a pretty good idea how the book will end. In this case, that's one of the reasons I read this book when I did. I needed something that, even though there might be incredibly sad or difficult parts, would end exactly as I wanted it to end. On that score, Shortridge did not disappoint, which I'm sure won't surprise you.

Publisher's Weekly did have this to say about the book:
"They’ll have to swallow some implausible plot turns and dubious character motivations along the way, but most will likely be too interested in Lucie’s slowly unfolding backstory to mind."
They are absolutely correct. Right from the first few pages, I cared about Lucie and wanted to find out what had happened to her that resulted in her going into a dissociative fugue (the current medical term for amnesia). And I so wanted Grady to have a happily-ever-after. Still, Shortridge does, in fact, force readers to buy into some plot points which are improbable. For example, Grady seems to want very little to do with his family despite the fact that they also seem to be very close. And for a guy who seems to want all six of his sisters to butt out of his life, he fell in love with a woman who was every bit as controlling. And that is the least of the issues of believability I had with the book.

And yet...

Shortridge made me do some research into amnesia when I doubted that someone suffering from amnesia would come to with an entirely different personality. They can. Which was a good thing, because I don't think I would have cared what happened to pre-amnesia Lucie. Post-amnesia Lucie was a woman working very hard to win over the man who so clearly loves her (although she can't seem to believe it), to find her own, new happiness, and to find out what happened to chase her away. That answer turned out to be twofold. And even though I wised up to what happened before we go to that part, it was shockingly sad, nevertheless.

Is it a great book? No. Was it just the book I needed when I read it? Absolutely.


2 comments:

  1. I agree with your last comment. We need these.

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  2. I read another book by this author and liked it pretty well and thought I had read this one. I haven't. Not sure why I never got to it as I do own a copy.

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