New Book Review: Second Chance Doctor

Title: Second Chance Doctor 

Author: Christi Sage

Date: 2023

Publisher: Christi Sage

Quote: "I remember everything; she remembers nothing."

At first glance this is just another sweet romance with a plot that seems particularly far-fetched, but I think this author may be telling us something she's observed about the real world, along with the "high school sweethearts meet again after fifteen years, are still single, fall in love again and live happily ever after" trope.

Part of the amnesiac character's problem seems out of date. It was baby-boomers who were officially named Catherine and called Cathy, who rejected the short form Cathy because there was always at least one other Cathy in every class at school. (In one of my classes there were two Cathies, or maybe Kathies, not closely related, who also had the same family name.) In different regional patterns of slang long words were abbreviated to either their beginnings or their ends; the dominant trend by the mid-1980s seemed to be for Cathies to want to be called Kate but one of my college classmates was a Ryn. But that's not a problem a girl the age of the heroine of this romance would have had; baby-boomers called daughters anything but Cathy, Or Debbie, Susan, Carol, Sharon, Karen, or Jennifer.

So this character has a more dramatic name and image problem. In defiance of fashion, she was named Catherine by long-lost parents and brought up by an abusive aunt who called her Cathy. Her high school sweetheart, who answers to Archer, Arch, or even Archie, called her Rin. When Rin's abusive aunt fell and threatened to tell people in their small town that Rin pushed her, Rin ran off to the city and promptly found an even more abusive boyfriend, the kind who was a "fiance" for years. Since he apparently has access to chloroform and doesn't hesitate to use it on people without their consent, it's just plausible that Rin might have genuine amnesia, a condition most reported during the years when chloroform was commonly used in hospitals. 

More recently reported, apparently true, amnesia stories have become a dominant theme at some "true crime" and "unsolved mystery" sites. For reasons unknown, they all seem to involve men, an abnormally high percentage of whom are truck drivers. Something to do with diesel fumes? Anyway, amnesia is rarely reported these days, and there's always been some doubt whether :psychogenic amnesia" really happened. Amnesia induced by brain trauma seems to be either less complete (people lose memories from only a short time) or more complete (some people go into comas). Christi Sage seems to be hinting in this novel, however, that the kind of amnesia that fascinated writers of detective and "thriller" stories in the 1930s was a genuine, specific drug reaction. This might be true. 

Anyway, this millennial-generation girl with this combination of baby-boomer and Greatest Generation problems picks a random name, Reina, and gets a part-time job, apparently an illegal job, and lives on junkfood in her car, apparently blocking all memories of who she really is. Then in a moment of post-traumatic stress she returns to the old home town and just happens to meet Archer, who just happens to have come back to the home place to get away from his stressful life as a doctor in Seattle.

So this lifelong victim wakes up in the home of her ex-boyfriend, feeling safe--and readers are asked to believe that she really is safe from any Inappropriate Involvement with dear old Archer. In real life I'd incline to believe that, since we're told that Rin's brain damage shows in enough other ways that a real man would be wary. What's hard to believe is that Archer would describe her brain-damaged behavior, not with clinical detachment, but with pure, idealistic, Christian love. (He's a Christian, and mentions it a few times in the novel, though he doesn't preach.) She stumbles around bumping into things--Archer took her home after she fell into a swimming pool and seemed unable to swim--and going into panics for no obvious reason. She would, in real life, evoke feelings of horror and revulsion in old friends.

It's a sweet romance, so we know that she'll recover enough memory and physical coordination to be accepted as sane by the end of the book. How her other problems are resolved is the only suspense the story can possibly have. Do true stories of amnesia ever end so well? In the 1930s some of them seemed to do; for all I know, this unlikely story might be based on facts, though those facts still seem more likely to have happened a hundred years ago than to happen now.