Friday, August 10, 2012

Amnesia by Sinclair Smith


Alicia awakes to discover she is in some kind of hospital, she can't remember who she is and she doesn't recognise herself in the mirror. Then, one day her sister, Marta, shows up and has her discharged. Alicia has no recollection of Marta and when she arrives home she is told their parents are dead. Nothing in the house is what she expects, all the clothes in her wardrobe are new and still have their price tags attached. Furthermore, the clothes are very drab, nothing like the clothes she feels she would have bought. There are no photos of her in the house, no radio, no television, not even newspapers or magazines. Alicia feels increasingly suffocated by Marta, she is not allowed to use the phone and Marta dictates what she can and can't eat. She  feels like a prisoner in the house. Then one day she leaves the house to go into town where she meets Mark, finally, someone who knows her...

This books moves along at a snail's pace and a lot of the action and conversations in the house are improbable, and, I kept asking myself why didn't Alicia leave the confines of the house earlier in the book? The action does pick up considerably in the second half of the book and the ending is a little unusual and unexpected.

No comments:

Post a Comment