Review: The Love I Could Have Had

The Love I Could Have Had by C.J. Connolly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Olivia should be the happiest woman in the world. She's engaged to her childhood sweetheart and best friend Jake. She has her own interior design business and has just totally transformed their little fixer-upper into a palace. They are getting married in just a few months' time, in a wedding that she has perfectly planned. Jake is so thoughtful, but she just feels a bit anxious, they've never even kissed someone else how can they be sure that they should be together? Also Jake is so thoughtful and always buys her her favourite white roses, but sometimes it would be nice to get some other flowers. Also Jake left town to go to law school and now he's ready to settle down and start a family, but Liv has never left her hometown, she'd like to travel the world for a few years before she thinks about kids (mind you how she thinks she can travel the world and run her own business I don't know).

They are having a picnic at their special place, a lake in an abandoned quarry that no-one ever visits. Liv walks off while Jake packs up the picnic, both of them naked as jaybirds, when Liv slips and falls off the edge of the quarry, but instead of being dashed on the rocks below, or miraculously falling into the lake, Liv ends up in an alternate universe where she died at that same quarry when she was twelve years old, in her reality Jake saved her, but in this reality he couldn't.

No-one believes she is Olivia, her grieving parents and sister think she's a confidence trickster who has stolen a dead child's identity, even when the DNA tests prove she is their daughter her father still finds it hard to believe.

Meanwhile Jake is going frantic trying to find Liv who has just vanished into thin air. The police search the woods and drag the lake but can find no trace of her. Where could she have gone with no phone, no clothes, and no money? Suspicion inevitably falls on Jake, did she run away because she didn't want to get married? Or did they have an argument?

The book alternates between Olivia in her new reality, a woman with no social security number, unable to tell people who she is, unable to get a job, or a mortgage, forced to live in her parents' pool house and be treated like a child, and Jake desperately searching for her in his reality.

This was an interesting take on the alternate reality switch, really brought it home that without basics like a birth certificate and social security number you really are nobody in modern society. forced to work cash-in-hand illegally. However, my overwhelming feeling when I finished this book was, what was the point? The blurb bills it as a chance for Liv to do all the things she couldn't do in her other life, but that was negated by the fact that she couldn't tell people who she was or get a job or live alone because she had no papers, so she didn't have a chance to live a different life. Also, she was still in love with Jake so how could she truly explore a life where she didn't love him?

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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