Love Water Memory. Finished 1-22-14, rating 3.5/5, fiction, 326 pages, pub. 2013

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.

from Goodreads

Suffering from dissociative fugue, Lucie is clueless. She has no idea where she belongs, who she really is, what the relationship is with her fiance, or who her friends are.  She is lost.  Grady takes her back to Seattle and their life together, but they are virtual strangers.  Lucie doesn’t remember anything and Grady isn’t familiar with the new Lucie, this new nicer woman who seems so curious.  The two try to navigate living together while she tries to piece together what happened to make her break like she did.

I can’t imagine suffering from amnesia, how hard it must be especially if you don’t have support.  Grady, as steady and nice as he was couldn’t have been adequate support for Lucie. Because she been all about her job before she didn’t have friends, or at least any that reached out to her.  How sad is that?  Grady didn’t seem to mind this and didn’t seem to want her to connect with the family she had, his sisters and her aunt. It was weird.  They both just went through the day, muddling along.  I was hoping for a little more oomph.  I liked the new and improved Lucie and am glad that even if she didn’t find memories she found some peace, but there was something off about the relationship with Grady, from both sides.

This was an okay novel for me.  I liked that the story was told from three perspectives and I loved seeing the way that Lucie really turned her life around.   It was enjoyable and led to some questions about relationships and do we see people the way they are or do we see them through the lens of our own insecurities and fears.  But the mystery wasn’t shocking by the time it was revealed and there wasn’t anything that really made me want to skip ten minutes of sleep and read the next chapter (the hallmark of a great book, in my humble opinion).

The gentleness of the storytelling was enough to make me want to read more from this author.  Good thing I already have When She Flew on my shelf!

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