Book review: Lost in Me by Lexi Ryan

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Hanna is involved in a mysterious accident that leaves her with a traumatic brain injury and retrograde amnesia. Her memories of the last nine months have just disappeared and she’s relying on her sister, her best friends, and her longtime crush turned fiance, Max, to fill her in on the details. When she wakes up into this life, she thinks that everything is perfect, but she soon finds secrets lurking beneath the surface.

I’m a little conflicted about this one. It’s almost compulsively readable, written in the sort of style that forces you to continue since each chapter ends on a little bit of a cliffhanger. It’s also very short, and at just over 200 pages, I finished it in a little over two hours. I’ll be upfront and say that the book ends with absolutely no resolution — what could have been one reasonably-sized book has inexplicably been broken up into three very short parts.

Mild spoilers ahead.

The first installment of the series sets up the story pretty well. Lexi Ryan keeps us in suspense as we try to figure out what happened over the last nine months. Hanna has lost a significant amount of weight. She’s cut herself off from her family and friends. She’s opened a business with an anonymous silent partner. She’s engaged to the man she’s lusted after for years. She might just be having an affair with a nerdy rockstar. And something happened to cause the brain injury.

There were things that I enjoyed about this book — mainly Nate and that the author kept me interested enough to finish the book in a matter of about two hours — and things that I didn’t enjoy, which I’ll outline below.

• I hate cheating. I hate love triangles. I’m still a little unclear on the timing of everything. Was Hanna having an affair? If she’d been seeing Nate, why did she have Max’s ring? There’s a huge chunk of her memory still missing at the end of the book, and I don’t care enough to continue on with the series.
• It’s pretty obvious that Hanna was unhappy in her relationship with Max. (Hello, Nate.) I get that Max is supposed to be this super-sexy guy that she spent her whole life lusting over, but that’s no reason to stay with him if it’s not a good relationship.
• It was so weird how Hanna’s mom pushed so hard for the wedding. Like, your kid just woke up with a traumatic brain injury and literal amnesia. Maybe the wedding planning can wait?
• I have a feeling about the mysterious injury, but I guess I’ll never know if I’m right because I don’t feel like reading another 400 pages of angst and drama to get five days’ worth of information. I know it’s the cool thing in new adult fiction to break a simple story up into multiple volumes, but I hate it and I wish I could’ve just read one long book with everything resolved at the end.
• No spoilers here, but the book ends with the most obvious twist. A twist that happens to be one of my least favorite plot conventions ever. Ugh.

In the end, the book is fine but not one that I’d necessarily recommend.

#killingthetbr: one year on shelf

Final rating: ★★☆☆☆

Have you read Lost in Me? What did you think? Can you tell me how Hanna got injured or how the series ends?