Friday 18 September 2015

Blog Tour: Wake Up Call by Amy Avanzino

Today is my stop on the blog tour by Chick Lit Plus for Wake Up Call, the new book from Amy Avanzino.
I would like to thank CLP and Amy for a review copy in return for my honest opinion.


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?

About Amy Avanzino 
Amy Avanzino received a Bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley
and a Master's from the University of Washington. 
She is a former advertising executive, who has spent the last several years writing, while doing extensive hands-on research for her Wake-Up Call series. 
She’s a contributing writer of Hap Scotch, a play performed at the 2008 Frigid Festival in New York, which won two Audience Choice Awards. Amy currently lives in Folsom, California, with her husband and four children. 
Connect with Amy at www.amyavanzino.com
@AmyAvanzino

My Review.
Amy Avanzino has a big future in the author/book/writing industry if all her books are as good as Wake Up Call! 
The book starts with the main character, Sarah, waking with one killer hangover in her boyfriends bed. There is a noise that she's unable to make out and she just wants to go home. Scrambling to the door her boyfriend Kofi stops her in her tracks. We quickly discover that Kofi is not her boyfriend but her husband and that noise is coming from a kid in his bed... A kid that Sarah bore into the world... A kid that is actually one of three... Clear to say, Sarah freaked at this point!!
A trip to the medical centre and Sarah is diagnosed with amnesia - a result of her falling of her child's skateboard and bumping her head the night before. Erased is the last five years of her life... Sarah knows nothing of her life as it is. She doesn't know how to care for the children, how to be a wife, clean the house, change nappies, cook a family meal or even go to the park with mums in the neighbourhood - a neighbourhood she also doesn't recall moving too.
Everything is new and nothing is familiar for Sarah. All that she knows is five years before where she was a career woman, ordering skinny lattes and having happy hours with her three girl friends. She wants to go back to that life and starts by contacting the girls,but it's clear from the phone calls that their lives aren't as Sarah knows. Meanwhile she bumps into Troy at one of her hospital appointments, and enjoys the flirt and company with him, telling herself even more so that life with Kofi and the kids just isn't hers.
When Sarah jeopardises Kofi's work prospects and almost sleeps with Troy she starts to feel guilty, and as much as she is unfamiliar with her children, there's something there.. Pulling at her heart strings. Although her memory is still absent, Sarah vows to try harder and re-connects with her neighbours and new friends and slowly she begins to get into a routine of life as the new her.
The book was fabulously written, with laugh out loud moments of humour at some of Sarah's mishaps and feelings at her "new" life, yet there was sensitivity at the issue of amnesia, and it really made you think about your own life and not to take things for granted as a simple accident could have lasting results... I can't imagine how people cope when they can't remember anything from their "normal day". 
I believe that Wake Up Call is the first book of a series so I'm looking forward to rejoining Sarah and her new life to see what happens next! 



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