Reviews for The me I used to be : a novel
Publishers Weekly
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Four friends torn apart by tragedy reconnect at their 25th high school reunion in Higgins’s unexceptional latest. The Core Four were the envy of their Vermont school. Audrey Porter was always lucky, Micah Dell was beautiful, Jasmine Malinowski had the brains, and Beck Morrow excelled at sports. But after a car accident following a graduation party, in which Jasmine was driving, left Audrey’s mother dead and Beck with a broken leg, they fell out of touch. Audrey contacts the others and persuades them to come back for the reunion. Once there, Audrey tells them her luck has run out. She’s been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and plans to end her life before losing her mind. Things haven’t turned out so well for the other women, either. Beck, who was expected to have a promising basketball career before the accident, is now being sued for sexual harassment; Jasmine, who grew up poor, married into money but is unhappy as a stay-at-home mom; and Micah, pregnant at the end of high school, has stayed in town to take over her family’s bakery. In lieu of a plot, Higgins’s character-driven novel sees the women try to figure out whether their friendship can lead them back to their true selves. The feel-good ending satisfies, but for the most part the story is a bit schmaltzy. The author’s fans will appreciate this one, but it’s unlikely to win her new ones. (Sept.)
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
A reunion leads to uncovered secrets and self-discovery for the “core four,” high-school friends who haven’t seen each other since a horrible accident right before graduation. Audrey, diagnosed with early-onset dementia, has asked the others to join her for their twenty-fifth reunion, determined to make up with her former best friends and feel like her true self one last time, but none of their lives turned out the way they thought they would. Higgins (Pack Up the Moon, 2021) uses multiple narrators and time lines to follow each woman’s path to finding herself again. Poignant writing and solid descriptions of dementia’s impact make for a touching story of how it’s never too late to be who we really are. The relationships among the core four as well as the one between Audrey and her stepdaughter (whose narration tries too hard to sound realistically teen) would have benefited from greater depth in the characterization and a little less reliance on stereotypes (the “smart one,” etc.). Lighter on romance than some of Higgins' earlier work, this will appeal to fans of Lisa Genova’s Still Alice (2009) and novels by Emily Giffin and Susan Wiggs.
