Promoted as a psychological thriller, I was attracted to this book when looking for a challenging, mature book with some new and intriguing characters that differed from the usual angsty teen romances that seem to fill my school’s library.
At first I was excited. A character with amnesia is something completely new and filled me with anticipation of what life of an amnesiac is like. However, when the details of her amnesia arose, I was less thrilled. The main character, Christine Lucas, has retrograde amnesia from a mysterious traumatic experience that occurred an unknown number of years earlier, and she also has anterograde amnesia which affects her short-term memory. This is highly coincidental and makes the story less believable.
Anyway, the idea is that every morning Chrissie wakes up and is utterly bewildered by her own elderly image reflected in the mirror. The mirror is encircled by pictures of her and a man. It turns out the man is in her bed and he is naked. She becomes giddish yet scared alike a child would upon seeing a middle-aged naked man, who explains that he is her loving husband, Ben, and that she has amnesia. This beginning I liked, it gives an insight into how difficult living with amnesia must be.
Ben leaves for work and Christine receives a phone call from a man who turns out to be her doctor. He directs her to a cupboard with a shoebox in it and in the shoebox is a journal (not a video camera like in the film). The first page of the diary reads “DON’T TRUST BEN”. This is followed by entries about her day, mainly mundane activities. Each day she reads what’s previously written in her journal, and is extremely confused as she can never remember the previous entries. Dr. Nash also says he and Chrissie have been working together on rebuilding and restoring her memory but not telling ben about it. He asks to meet and Christine, led by a desire to discover more and an innate sense of trust in Dr. Nash, agrees.
As the book progresses you begin to realise something isn’t right, and you know who it must involve but you can’t figure out why. Nonetheless, the mystery became less believable, and so, less interesting as it grew.
There is plenty of deceit, which I enjoyed, as the book became almost a detective story – trying to work out the truth about Christine’s life. Her husband lies about how she got amnesia, her son and who he himself is, which should make a mysterious plot. Nevertheless, the numerable flaws to the story render it a pretty unsatisfying read. (spoilers to follow)
It is discovered that Chrissie was collected from the hospital after her accident by Ben, but Ben is not actually Ben; effectively he is a man who became obsessed with her, whilst she was having an affair with him and, therefore, kidnapped Chrissie in plain sight from the rehabilitation ward. Would a hospital actually have discharged Chrissy and handed her over to someone without any background checks being made?
Also, Dr. Nash behaves extremely unprofessionally around Chrissie, which I thought was to make the reader question his authenticity, but it turns out he just has a crush on his patient! Very disappointing.
Moreover, halfway through the book we discover the Chrissie is a mother but she does not remember childbirth and her son is kept by her real husband, who does not even try to contact her at all; so she is shocked and upset. She must have realised that she had given birth; there would be remaining scars from the pregnancy, surely?
There are many more unreasonable plot twists in this story. I am a fan of plot twists – I really do not like predictable stories – but this book took it too far. You could predict that Ben was not who he claimed to be but that she had a 15 year-old son who just accepted that one day his mum disappeared, was admittedly unpredictable (good) but it was so ridiculously unbelievable that it unravelled the plausibility of the book. Also, the ending was a bit over dramatic perhaps overcompensating for the dullness of the first half, where Chrissie just wakes up and rediscovers who she is again and again (I understand this may be a metaphor for how frustrating amnesia is but it still makes a boring read).
Overall, I found this book to be very slow and drawn-out and I thought Claire’s character was particularly weak – Chrissie’s best friend who doesn’t even speak to her after a terrible accident, really? This book is really just a presentation of the worst people to have to support you when you lose your memory. This book seems more fantasy – and it would make an excellent fantasy – but it is promoted as a real-life thriller, which it does almost fill the criteria for – it is brutally day to day at first: full of everyday, common, relatable events that slowly begin to unravel, but then the characters disintegrate
Learning in Parallel 