Loved and Lost by Allison Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Loved and Lost is a memoir narrated by eighty-six year old Abigail Milan. Abby tells Carrie, her carer, about the few years of her teenage life when she experienced a great first love to a boy she believed was her soul mate, we as the reader are like a fly on the wall listening in to the tale.
Full of teenage hormones and attitude we meet Abby and Allen in 1994, they quickly become inseparable in the intense first love of teenagers and go through many highs and lows with several break-ups. Abby is jealous of Al’s girl friends and he in turn doesn’t like her mixing with other boys. Throw in underage drinking, a sex life that leads to an unplanned pregnancy, plus and a social life that many teenagers follow.
Abby tells Carrie about these couple of years in infinite detail remembering all the arguments, phone calls, anxiety and accusations as if it were yesterday. For these teenagers it was the be all and end all of life, yet Abby went on to live another seventy years. She’ll not forget Al and the love she had for him.
This book hovers across the YA and NA genres, at sixteen the characters are a little young for the new adult genre, yet the underage drinking and sex scenes are not really for the young adult market. The story ended a little abruptly for me and didn’t return to Abby and her carer for any summary or reason for the whole memoir storyline.
Find a copy here from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
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Rosie Amber 