Annie Beyers has everything—a beautiful house, a loving husband, and an adorable daughter. It’s a day like any other when she takes Hannah to the pediatrician…until she wakes hours later from a car accident. When she asks for her daughter, confused doctors tell Annie that Hannah never existed. In fact, nothing after waking from the crash is the same as Annie remembers. Five happy years of her life apparently never happened.
Annie’s marriage is coming to an end. Now a successful artist living in Manhattan, she’s no longer home in their beloved upstate farmhouse. Her long-estranged sister is more like a best friend, and her recently deceased dog is alive and well. With each passing day, Annie’s remembered past and unfamiliar present begin to blur. Haunted by visions of Hannah, and with knowledge of things she can’t explain, Annie wonders…is everyone lying to her?
The search for answers leads Annie down an illuminating path far from home, to reconcile the memories with reality and to discover the truth about the life she’s living.
Comment: This is another book I've added to my TBR and I can't remember exactly why. Having finished the novel, I think it probably had to do with the premise: a young woman has an accident and when she wakes up asking for her daughter, everyone told her she had no children...
In this story we follow the life of Annie Byers, a woman who sees her life drastically change after a car crash. When she wakes up in the hospital, no one seems to know she has a daughter and worse, her life is nothing of what she remembers. Still, Annie tries to find clues to prove her memories cannot be wrong, and the more she investigates, the more confused she becomes, especially after checking a piece written by a UK journalist about others who, like her, remember different lives than the ones they live. Still, Annie feels lost because she has memories of a child and a marriage that her current reality prove wrong. Who can she believe? What is happening to her?
The premise of this book was intriguing indeed. I've also seen the labels and focused on the mystery and thriller ones, which led me to believe this would be one of those stories where the protagonist is caught in a kind of weirdly wicked plan to make her doubt herself and such. However, as the story went on, there were other elements introduced and things started to feel more like a science fiction plot...
The narrative is told in first person by Annie and she is likable enough for me to kept reading with interest. What I feel conflicted about is that this story had a lot going on and, not being a very big novel, I've felt some elements weren't developed enough for the whole thing to feel consistent. Thinking about things now, I would say there was too much going on.
At first I thought this had the vibes of a woman's fiction kind of story: the plot starts with Annie preparing things to take her daughter to the doctor, her husband is away and cannot travel easily due to the weather and I started thinking this would be a drama about losing her child or something. Then, we have the accident and now we're doubting Annie's narrative, just like in any good unreliable narrator type of thriller. I thought that, yes, this will lead into a mystery novel and I was wondering if we would discover everyone around Annie is somehow plotting against her and why.
However, Annie's certainty that she had a daughter that no one else remembered takes her into investigating other people who, like her, have memories of people and lives that they can't return to and then she starts believing the possibility of different dimensions and/or time travel. This includes her traveling to the UK to meet the journalist and even checking out a psychic and work of scientists who published on the subject. By now I was a little confused. Intrigued yet, but confused. I'm not against time travel stories, in fact I've read many by now, but it felt the author was introducing too many variables and none really paid out.
Of course, none of this would be such an obvious issue if the writing in general had been more appealing. Or, to say it better, if the sequence of situations had been written in a more appealing way. Besides, having only Annie's POV and this not really being the thriller it seemed to at some point means that a few scene changes feel unrealistic... or we follow Annie's thoughts and reactions or we are given plot development and some things shared by Annie don't seem to make as much sense when it's told by her.
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