After You

A postcard bringing news of a boating accident prompts a 34-year-old married woman to revisit her first love affair in Garrett's latest sentimental novel (after Because I Wanted You, 1997). In flashbacks recounted to her friend Jojo over lunch in New York's Central Park, Clare McClendon relives the passion she once had for fisherman Riley Brackett during the summer of her 17th year, which she spent in Maine after having been sent away from her Midwestern home while her mother was dying of cancer. Clare is now a successful TV broadcaster, but she feels estranged from her husband, Michael, who has become absorbed in his own mother's battle with cancer. When Riley's wife pleads for Clare's help because Riley's head injury has rendered him amnesiac about everything but their affair, Clare feels she must go to Maine to try to reactivate Riley's memory. But the still-besotted Riley is unwilling to hear that the years have wrought a great many changes, namely both their marriages and a hinted-at illness for Clare. The plot at this point becomes manipulative and maudlin; that Clare, too, has had breast cancer, a fact that she doesn't reveal to Riley, seems designed to keep readers reaching for Kleenexes. The accumulation of physical and emotional pain is artificially palliated by Clare's epiphany that all life is a risk and that, while ""the sun is still shining,"" one should embrace both memories and hopes for the future. The ending, with Clare and Michael on a hilltop, has all the subtlety of a Hallmark card. Film rights to Mark Johnson Productions for DreamWorks. (Sept.) FYI: Annie Garrett is the pseudonym of Kelli Pryor, a ""celebrity journalist.""