Please note that I read this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
“Forget Me Not” follows Claire Campbell, jobless as a journalist and trying her best to freelance, she is called back to her hometown by her estranged father. Claire’s mother has been in an accident and needs help and her father asks her to do it. We quickly find out though that the reason why Claire is estranged from both her parents, her older sister Natalie, disappeared, and was believed to be killed by an older boyfriend she was secretly dating. With Natalie back home, she travels back to the vineyard her sister worked at long ago and then gets a job there and thinks the two owners of the place, and a worker named Liam seem to be hiding something. The book shifts between Claire in the present and a younger Marcia (the wife of the owner of the vineyard) who kept a diary in the 1980s.
This just had way too many coincidences for me to find believable after a while. And then of course how everything tied together in the end didn’t really work. I thought the overall idea behind the novel was fine, but I had a hard time with the character of Claire who I felt just kept doing increasingly dumb things. She didn’t really do anything I think outside of read the diary she found from the older woman that lived on the vineyard, snooped, talked to Liam or her partially estranged boyfriend, and then snooped some more. I also had to kind of toss up my hands about what she does after she finds out Marcia’s background prior to living on the vineyard.
And I have to say my least favorite literary device in the modern thrillers that are coming out these days is that someone finds a diary/journal and then the way it is written does not have it in the first person perspective. I had a diary and even journaled until I stopped by the time I was 28. You don’t write about something in the third person perspective. Everytime the book shifted to a younger Marcia in the 1980s I just got taken out of the story.
The setting of the vineyard and South Carolina could have been interesting, but honestly the setting of the story could have been anywhere.
The ending just tied things up way too neatly to be believed. I just wish that there had been more there there with how things got resolved.