Aberration by Danielle Simmons
My rating: 3/5 cats
thank you, danielle simmons, for stepping up and offering me a copy of this book after my devastating, but expected, firstreads loss. i still can’t catch a break from those cruel firstreads gods.
when i was twelve or so, i read The Other Side of Dark. so many times. and i loved it. in it, a girl is shot during the murder of her mother, goes into a coma, and awakens four years later to find herself with amnesia in a body she doesn’t recognize, her mother dead, and the killer still unknown. as a kid, i loved the idea of waking up into an unfamiliar world and the horror of having become a different person, physically, while you were asleep and having to recapture the events of the lost years and solve a mystery along the way. what fun! and as unrealistic as it is to go to sleep an awkward teen and wake up as a hot woman, with very few physical and psychological repercussions from your coma, that was the YA of my youth. they lacked emotional sophistication and psychological insight and were just plot-driven books with no logic necessary, because of course in this one, despite being a thirteen-year-old girl for all intents and purposes, she manages to solve the crime and find a boy along the way. score!
that’s what i thought this book was going to be. a girl awakens from a coma to find that the accident she was in claimed the lives of three of her closest friends, and she can remember nothing. i expected this would be a mystery novel where there would be some major twists and red herrings and our spunky heroine would solve the big mystery of the accident and probably find a man along the way.
but.
gather round, romance readers, because this is your kind of book.
judging by the cover and the synopsis, i never would have expected this to be a romance novel. and i was a good way in before the penny dropped, and i had to alter my expectations and go with the flow. this book is a way more character-driven take on the aftermath of the coma-victim than the nixon i loved as a kid. it is also not YA, although a contemporary YA book would probably handle the material more like this one.
this book has all the traditional elements of a romance novel: a woman wrestling with her feelings, a man who is familiar, yet distant, the “other man,” and a beautiful dress, but it is also the story of a woman trying to find herself in what she has lost.
this coma is “only” a two-month coma, so she doesn’t have to make up too much time, but she remembers nothing of the accident, nor of the week immediately preceding the accident. turns out it was a pretty important week to not remember.
laney’s journey is less about being a girl-detective and figuring out the facts from clues, and more of a detective of herself, as she sifts through her memories and tries to reconnect with evan, her last surviving friend, so they can grieve together instead of on their own. this is an emotional book that deals with past and family and the way our perceptions of events change over time, as they become memories, how our friendships shape us but can also hold us back. and also, romance.
also—something i cannot talk about because it is a pretty significant twist. so—shhhhh is me.
if you were one of the firstreads winners, you should read it and review it because somehow mine is going to be the first review of it?? that seems like maybe the people who are winning the books are not holding up their end of the bargain. but i would. i would, firstreads gods who snub me every month…i would.
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