Review: The Secret History of Us by Jessi Kirby

Title: The Secret History of Us
Author: Jessi Kirby
Publisher: HarperTeen
Release date: September 7th 2010
Source: Edelweiss
Format: eARC

Rating: 3.5/5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

Gorgeously written and emotionally charged, The Secret History of Us explores the difficult journey of a teenage girl who must piece her life together after losing her memory in a near-fatal accident.

When Olivia awakes in a hospital bed following a car accident that almost took her life, she can’t remember the details about how she got there. She figures the fog is just a symptom of being in a week-long coma, but as time goes on, she realizes she’s lost more than just the last several days of her life—she’s lost her memory of the last four years. Gone is any recollection of starting or graduating high school; the prom; or her steady boyfriend Matt. Trying to figure out who she is feels impossible when everyone keeps telling her who she was.

As Liv tries to block out what her family and friends say about who she used to be, the one person she hasn’t heard enough from is Walker, the guy who saved her the night her car was knocked off that bridge into the bay below. Walker is the hardened boy who’s been keeping his distance—and the only person Olivia inexplicably feels herself with. With her feelings growing for Walker, tensions rising with Matt, and secrets she can’t help but feel are being kept from her, Olivia must find her place in a life she doesn’t remember living.

I read The Secret History of Us in record time at least for me, I admit that is not a very long book since it only has 288 pages, but I read it in a matter of hours that for me is very fast, because the plot hooked me from the prologue and it really did not let go until the end.

The story begins with Olivia waking up in the hospital, not knowing what she does there, nor how she got there, when she wakes up she´s inform that she was in a car accident and that's it, shortly afterwards they give more details of her accident, but all the information that her parents give her was very ambiguous, since they do not want to upset her and they also want to protect her. Several chapters went by before we learned that Olivia has amnesia (something that is not spoiler because it comes in the blurb), and that she didn´t remember several years of her life. A great part of the plot lies around her loss of memory and how she discovers things that had changed in her life, as she is no longer friends with certain people from her childhood, nor does she follows one of her great passions and now she has a boyfriend whom she doesn´t remember and that all the people close to her tell her that they were madly in love with each other, but she does not feel anything when she with him.

Something that I saw as impossible or that she had very bad doctors, is that they don´t test her to see how her memory is soon after she wakes up, after having a car accident, in addition to being hospitalized and in a week-induced coma, it isn´t until Olivia makes a comment about it, that the doctor made some tests on her.

Apart from that, we see how Olivia returned to her life where everyone tells her how she was before the accident and she tries to do the same things for the sake of others, but little by little she realizes that there are things of her that nobody knew and that little by little she begins to discover new things about her.

Overall, I enjoyed The Secret History of Us, it's a good story about where the main character is amnesic and her life after her accident , it has a few twists to the end of the story and it has a good ending.