| Title: | The Husband She Couldn't Remember | |
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| Author: | Maggie Shayne | |
| Publication Date: | July 2011 | |
| Publisher's Description | The Husband She Couldn't Remember by Maggie Shayne Very slowly, Ben turned around. Penny stood not two feet from him. She wasn’t looking at him, but past him at that pink-hued granite marker. His wife stood in front of him, staring at her own grave. Ben’s hands moved slowly, reaching out, touching her shoulders, very nearly jerking away again when he found warm, solid flesh instead of some ghostly mist. She was real. And he closed his hands on her instead. “Penny?” And finally her eyes met his. “Penny, is it really you?” Her lower lip trembled. “You aren’t going to believe this, but...I don’t know,” she told him in a soft voice. “Is it?” |
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| My rating: | ***.5 | |
I thought this book was a good, light read. (I say light even though there were some woman-in-jeopardy scenes here, because good conquered evil, and did a fine job of it, too). Penny was effortlessly full of personality in a way that I think many romance heroines are supposed to be but rarely are. She was in full control of her destiny, and even not knowing who she was didn’t get in the way of what she was able to accomplish.
I am usually wary about books that deal with amnesia, but I’ve enjoyed other Maggie Shayne books and so decided to read this one. Even though it was from the 90s, this book didn’t feel dated to me at all. Penny was a complicated character who had been put into a strange situation, but reacted a lot better than I think a lot of people might have. Likewise, I really enjoyed the way the Brands pulled her into their lives and tried to adjust to how she’d changed. I thought it was smart of Ms. Shayne to make Chelsea, a newer Brand, her closest family confidante upon her return to the ranch, rather than a person who Penny had known prior to her disappearance. The lack of baggage in the relationship was an excellent counterpoint to the adjustments that the other Brands had to make to this Penny who was so different from the Penny they’d last seen.
Ben’s recognition of Penny’s self-sufficiency worked well for me. He had to integrate this healthy almost-stranger (from her perspective) into what he knew of his formerly dying wife. I liked how he celebrated exactly what this meant in terms of the help they received from Penny’s clues while he and Garrett were looking for her. Ben had a temper, and I appreciated that he felt bad for it, and recognized what it may have cost him.
There were definitely some things that didn’t work for me. I wanted to know what Kristen’s secret was, because clearly there was a lot more to her story than was in this book. I know that Garrett said there wouldn’t be any legal repercussions for faking Penny’s death, but what about any insurance money that might have been collected upon her faked demise? How does she go about validating that she is who she says she is, two years after somebody else was buried in her name? Also, the a wizard did it, way that Barlow’s cure suddenly seemed to work at the end, when it was repeated time and again that Penny was the only person he’d cured, didn’t make a ton of sense to me.
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