A Moment Like Forever

by Martina Reilly

[Leah]

Two years ago, Andy went travelling with best friend Lexi, determined to have some fun together whilst they visited new places. What Andy didn’t expect was to come back from the trip, bruised, broken and scarred with Lexi missing after a catastrophic accident. Two years down the line, Andy is little more than a hermit, living her life without leaving her apartment, with the only time she ever goes out having to be in total darkness so nobody sees her scar. She knows that it’s no way to live, so when her sister Kate’s flat burns down, she agrees Kate and her boyfriend Luke can move in with her and her cat, Baz. Andy soon realises that despite everything she has gone through, and is still feeling, it isn’t just her who was affected the day of the accident and realises that she’s been hiding for too long and needs to change her life and stop being scared of what other people think. It’s not easy for her, even more so since she still wonders exactly what happened to best friend Lexi, and is desperate for any kind of closure. But Andy has secrets of her own, secrets that will eventually come out.

I’m a really big fan of Martina Reilly, and I started reading her books when she wrote under her former name of Tina Reilly. Her stories are true to life, funny and they usually always make me cry. I’ve read most of her novels and she’s become a Chick Lit staple for me and I always look forward to her newest books as and when they come out. I managed to get a copy of her latest book A Moment Like Forever and I couldn’t to read it. I certainly wasn’t disappointed with the book and I absolutely loved it.

Much like her previous novels A Moment Like Forever is another corker of a story. Martina seems to pick a topic to focus on throughout her novels – adoption, murder – before then putting her own spin on things to give us an unforgettable story. A Moment Like Forever features loneliness and guilt, mainly, among other things. Martina Reilly deftly handles each and every topic covered and the journey which Andy takes is really quite something. Another thing Martina inserts into her novels is that air of mystery, and with A Moment Like Forever, we have the mystery of Lexi. What happened to her the day Andy got her scar, and where exactly is she? It was a very compelling part of the novel, and it had me completely hooked because I wanted to know what had happened to her.

The book starts just as Kate and Luke’s flat burns down and I was hooked immediately as Andy agrees to let them stay with her. It’s clear that Andy has some serious issues, so having Kate and Luke move in really spiced things up for Andy. We then follow Andy’s life from there, as it’s told in first-person, and she also explains about everything that happened on that sad day to cause her life to change so completely. Running alongside that, we have Lexi’s story, told in the third person narrative, about how she’s decided to finally come back to civilisation and ends up in a small town called Salue. It was interested to have the two stories run alongside each other, changing from Andy to Lexi from chapter to chapter and I thought both were very intriguing for many different ways.

I warmed to Andy immediately, there’s something so vulnerable about her (as you might expect), and I just wanted to hug her and tell her it would all be all right! It seemed such a shame that something so terrible had happened to such a lovely person! I was also really taken in by Kate and Luke, compared to Andy their lives are so easy and carefree and their infectiousness really pulled me in and I thought they complemented each other very well. Lexi seemed like an interesting character as well, a bit mysterious but everything we glean about her adds more to her character helped along by what we learn from Andy about her. Another character who I liked was Alastair, Andy’s boss, and for a long while the only person she sees outside of her family and Lexi’s family. He was so quirky – he owns a funeral magazine, what on Earth did I expect? – but he and Andy rubbed along really well. Andy’s parents, Donald and Lil, were hilarious – literally funny – but they had their touching moments, too.

About three quarters of the way into the book there is a big plot twist, which took even me by surprise. Recently I’ve believed that books fail to shock me anymore, that any plot twist that happens is so obvious I find it boring but this one in A Moment Like Forever shocked me. It seemed to come completely out of left-field (it didn’t, of course), and despite my shock, it completely made sense. It took me a while to fully comprehend it all but it soon all slotted into place, and my brain caught up with everything I had learned. Martina Reilly really pulled that one off, there’s no doubt about it. And that’s what I like about Martina, just when I think no book can shock me, she manages to do it. Her books are consistently good and I adore her story-telling abilities. A Moment Like Forever is Martina at her best, and she is without doubt one of the best Chick Lit authors around. I hugely recommend the book, as you can probably tell, it’s well worth your time and money!