Book tour: Wake-up Call - Amy Avanzino

 

Sarah Winslow wakes up with a terrible hangover… and a kid in her boyfriend’s bed. She makes the horrifying discovery that, due to a head injury, it’s not a hangover. She’s got memory loss. Overnight, five years have disappeared, and she’s no longer the hard-living, fast-track, ad executive party girl she thinks she is. Now, she’s the unemployed, pudgy, married, stay-at-home-mom of three kids under five, including twins. As she slowly pieces together the mystery of how her dreams and aspirations could have disintegrated so completely in five short years, she finds herself utterly failing to manage this life she can’t imagine choosing. When Sarah meets the man of her dreams, she realizes she’s got to make a choice: Does she follow her bliss and “do-over” her life? Or does the Sarah she’s forgotten hold the answers to how she got here… and how she can stay?

My opinion.

First I have to mention the cover: I think it's absolutely brilliant in it's simplicity. The vibrant colours really make it 'pop' and I'm sure it wouldn't go unnoticed in a bookshop (online or otherwise).

It set the tone for the rest of the novel as well. There aren't too many characters to get to know and the story line isn't that complicated: the focus is solely on Sarah's 'journey'... or 'struggle', more appropriately. This way you could really invest yourself in her story without being distracted by too many other things happening around the main story line.

Amy Avanzino proves herself to be a very talented storyteller. Her main character goes through some 'ups and downs' (to put it lightly), and Amy's depiction of those 'downs', feels so real that Sarah's mood is almost contagious. This piece of brilliance is at the same time the one thing I didn't like about my reading experience: at the point where Sarah is truly unhappy and seems to be well on her way to mess everything up, I felt really down and it became harder to really enjoy reading.

That being said, if - in the future - I'm ever lucky enough to be raising a family which is making me feel exhausted and maybe even a little hopeless, I think I'd love to come back to this book - which is not only an entertaining read but also a huge thumbs up and pat on the back to all moms.

Wake-up Call is a truly moving, insightful and inspirational story and I'd love to read the rest of The Wake-Up Series.