The Twilight Wife by A.J. Banner. A Book Review.

I must confess something. Last year I only read three books. Three.
Dozens and dozens of articles and thousands upon thousands of reddit comments, most assuredly, but only three books. I know, pretty sad.

So I decided that this year would be different. I heard about a website called Bookbub that would send you emails, alerting you to ebooks that are discounted or free on various ebook vending websites. Its pretty neat. Free is free, ya know?

One such book I saw was called The Twilight Wife by A.J. Banner. Something about the summary caught my attention, and despite not being free, only discounted, I still decided, what the heck, buy it, read it. Reviews said it was short. I was coming up fast on March and needed to get in gear with this whole "read more" thing.

The setup of the novel is this woman, Kyra Winthrope, was in a diving accident where she hit her head and is now suffering from amnesia. She's lost the last four years of her life, and has trouble forming new memories. She, along with her husband Jacob, live on Mystic Island, a fictional island in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington. As she begins to remember bits and pieces of the previous four years, along with nightmares that may or may not have been the accident itself, things don't seem to quite line up with everything she's being told.

So, this isn't exactly my normal fare, but what the heck.

Honestly, overall I would say I enjoyed it. It really was an easy read on top of being short, so I got through it pretty fast. The chapters were generally short enough that I could read one or two on break at work, or just in-between moments of life. It seemed to take a minute to get all the setup out of the way and onto the interesting stuff, but considering how I just explained how short the thing was, this is hardly a harsh criticism.

The book is written in first person present tense. I normally hate this. Present tense for a narrative format just feels so weird to me. I've tried with other books before and after a page of torture I've put them down. Despite that, I actually give this book a pass, but for a very specific reason. I think first of all maybe I just got over myself (though still not a present-tense fan), but more importantly it actually allowed A.J. Banner to do something actually pretty cool. While the main narrative of what Kyra is doing is all in present tense, when she begins to remember something, she switches to speaking in past tense. Its relatively subtle, despite feeling obvious, and allows Banner to switch between the past and the "here and now," so-to-speak, seamlessly. Present tense also just generally seems to make sense for a protagonist experiencing amnesia anyway. Maybe using the tenses this way isn't original, but its the first I've seen it and it worked.

Now, with a novel like this, from the outset we're basically told that there is a twist. It was billed as a thriller, the whole setup with the lost memories slowly coming back, other people on the island maybe knowing something that our protagonist doesn't- its all very obvious, right? Isn't the knowledge that there is a twist coming in some way usually diminishing of that twist? Like, the whole point of a twist is that you don't know what's coming, but the whole reason to read a book like this is that there is a twist, so is that self-defeating or not? Maybe I'm overthinking this.

Regardless of the meta-nature of twists in fiction, I have to say that I did find the direction the story went, as well as its conclusion, very satisfying. It may not be the most original of ideas, but I admit, I was pulled in. Just over half-way through the novel things really start to come to a head, and from that point on I honestly did not put the book down. It took me three days to get that far, but once I did I finished the book. Again, short book, so its not like I read a third of Way of Kings in a day, but at least note that the book was well-written and interesting enough to get me to do that.

Overall, enjoyable, interesting. If you're looking for a quick read and find it still on sale, I would recommend. Amazon seems to tell me that the original list price is $15, which I would never spend on this book. For the two bucks I paid, however, I got at least two bucks worth of entertainment out of it.

Minor note on content here. Considering the marital nature of the book, there is some light, I suppose one would say "sexual content," but nothing explicit. Nothing more than one would see in a PG-13 movie.