It\u2019s 2023, and it\u2019s been two weeks since Beatrice Carter awoke from seizure-induced unconsciousness, and she still has no idea who she is. The only identification on her person was a gym membership card, and even then, she\u2019s unsure if the name on the ID is truly hers, as a police search yielded no results: \u201cBeatrice knew who the president was, how to drive a car, and where to get the best chicken marsala in Fairview [in Upstate New York],but her own hands were foreign things.\u201d She has a scar above her eye, which she apparently got during the seizure. She sets out to find clues to her identity by following the pull of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. It\u2019s a frightening ordeal\u2014after all, she\u2019s forced to second-guess not only who she is, but also the intentions of others. \u201cSo, we don\u2019t know each other then?\u201d she asks someone at one point. Is she the Bea \u201cwho owns the bookshop and bakery across the street\u201d? Then there\u2019s the case of gallery owner Vivian Sterling, the only witness to her accident\u2014who can\u2019t quite place her, at first. Flashback sequences from the protagonist\u2019s childhood detail her great-grandmother Gigi\u2019s battle with a strange form of dementia that seems to plague the family. This shadowy trip into Bea\u2019s past \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0brings forth new revelations, and there\u2019s one shadowy figure in particular who benefits from Bea not knowing the truth. Over the course of this novel, Wren offers readers an edgy twist on journeys of self-discovery, adding in elements of romance and betrayal. Throughout, Beatrice never knows who to trust, and the prose vibrates with the resulting tension: \u201cMaybe there was a reason she didn\u2019t remember everything, and maybe she was better off for it. Maybe this blank slate really was a blessing.\u201d As Bea comes to understand just what took her memory away, the good and bad aspects of such knowledge effectively come to the fore.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s 2023, and it\u2019s been two weeks since Beatrice Carter awoke from seizure-induced unconsciousness, and she still has no idea who she is. The only identification on her person was a gym membership card, and even then, she\u2019s unsure if the name on the ID is truly hers, as a police search yielded no results: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7657,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7656"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}