Review: Once, Again, Always by Amanda Gayle

You guys have no idea. Aster Bishop might be the yearniest man I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, and god, I cannot get him out of my head. I finished this book days ago and I am still thinking about him, which should tell you everything you need to know about how this review is going to go.

Molly Graham-Bishop wakes up with no memory of the last six years of her life, and she is shocked, and horrified to find that she is married. Not just married, married to her rival from college. AGH! Aster Bishop is none other than the college’s rich golden boy who made her life a living hell back when they were kids, and yet, here they are, somehow, fully and legally married, six years later. While Molly has to relearn her entire life from the past six years, piecing together who she became and who she loves, Aster is left reeling that the woman he married, the woman he has built a life with, has no idea who he is anymore. He is determined to make her remember. And if she can’t remember, he is just as determined to make her fall for him all over again.

I am such a sucker for amnesia storylines, and this one does something I love, which is use the memory loss as a way to let two characters meet each other again for the first time, while the reader already knows exactly how much history is underneath it. We get to watch Molly approach Aster with all the wariness of someone who remembers him as her enemy, while he is quietly, desperately trying to prove to her that the person she became chose him on purpose. That tension between what Molly believes about him and what the reader slowly learns is true is where this book shines, and I am OBSESSED with it.

And can we talk about Aster for a second?! Please. Aster Bishop, the yearning husband who says things like “be gentle with me” and gives us a full blown “where’s my wife?!” moment. I am not exaggerating when I say this man might be the yearniest MMC I have ever read in my life, and I’m struggling to remember another MMC that gave me this kind of yearninggggg. There is something so specific about a man who used to be the villain of someone’s story becoming the person who would do anything to get to them in a hospital bed, and Amanda Gayle writes that shift with so much tenderness. He is not performing devotion. He is just devoted, fully, and he lets Molly see every bit of how unmoored he is without her. He takes his time to show her that she’s everything to him, despite their past. If Molly didn’t fall for him, I freaking did, and I am not even a little bit ashamed to admit it.

I had the best, best, best time reading this book. Molly was not only an interesting character to follow, but she was genuinely fun to be around, which matters so much to me in a book narrated from inside someone’s head. I loved watching her navigate waking up in a life she doesn’t recognize, surrounded by people who love a version of her she can’t remember, and slowly falling for her own husband as if it were the very first time. There is something so moving about watching a character rediscover not just a relationship but herself, and who she has become over the past six years, and Molly’s arc gave me both. She gets to fall for Aster again, but she also gets to figure out who she became over six years she can’t remember living, and that part of the book hit just as hard as the romance did.

And if the love story alone doesn’t sell you on this one, the found family absolutely will. Every single side character in this book was hilarious, adorable, and so fully woven into Molly’s story that I would read an entire spinoff about any of them. They were the ones who got to watch Molly lose her memory and then watch her slowly come back to herself, and their reactions, their inside jokes with a version of Molly she doesn’t remember being, their patience and love for her through all of it, made the book so much richer. A found family subplot can so easily feel like filler in a romance, but here, it felt essential. It made the story whole. These are the people who make Molly’s world worth remembering, and by the end I understood exactly why she fought so hard to get her life back.

One of my favorite aspects of the book was the flashbacks into Molly’s past. We get these windows into who she was before she lost her memory, glimpses of the years she can’t access, layered in alongside the present day story of her friends and family slowly reintroducing her to her own life. It was like being transported into who she was and who she remembered being, and then dropped into confusion-land with Molly all over again. I loved getting both timelines at once. The flashbacks gave us the proof of everything Aster is trying to convince her of, showing us exactly how their relationship grew from enemies into something real, while the present day scenes gave us the joy of watching the people around her rediscover her all over again, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, always so clearly relieved to have her back in whatever form she comes back in. It is such a satisfying way to build a second chance romance, because we are never just told that Molly and Aster had something worth saving. We get to watch it unfold in real time, even as the present day Molly is meeting her own life as a stranger.

Honestly, I cannot wait to reread this one and fall even deeper into Aster Bishop.

Thank you to @harpercollins and @amandagaylewrites for the advance copy of Once, Again, Always in exchange for my honest review!