Close To Me by Amanda Reynolds

Close To Me by Amanda Reynolds
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



When Jo Harding falls down the stairs at home, she wakes up in hospital with partial amnesia - she's lost a whole year of memories.

A lot can happen in a year. Was Jo having an affair? Lying to her family? Starting a new life?

She can't remember what she did - or what happened the night she fell.

But she's beginning to realise she might not be as good a wife and mother as she thought.


It starts off quite promising, an accident that results in the memory loss of the past year for Jo Harding and the struggle to find the missing pieces. Her husband appears to want to keep her from getting her memory back and this provides the intrigue, what is he hiding, did he push her down the stairs and if so why? The chapters alternate between before and after the fall so we are able to piece together what leads up to the accident.

I wasn't really engaged with any of the characters they all seemed flat and under developed. Jo struggles with her memory and conscience as she wonders if she was having an affair or perhaps he was. She is also confused as to what has happened to both her daughter Sash and her son Fin - Fin appears to have been to university for a year and suddenly he's dropped out without any real explanation. Sash has hooked up with an older, and to Jo's mind, undesirable man and appears to have completely changed, her appearance, who she is etc. As the story unfolds we learn lies, secrets and betrayals within this dysfunctional family.

I didn't warm to the characters or even like them much although they are fairly believable they were not developed enough to connect with. The pace of the story does ebb and flow a bit, I did skim read some of the chapters as they were repetitive. The subject matter was promising and the book could have been so much better in my opinion that it was, it was for me a bit disappointing. I did also guess the ending so it was not unpredictable at all, I kept waiting for a killer twist but there wasn't any. It was a passable novel, nothing special and not really very memorable - can only give this 3 stars.

I would like to thank the publisher for sending this in exchange for an honest review.