Forget Me Not

by Stacy Willingham ★★★☆☆

When she was eleven-years-old, Claire Campbell's older sister Natalie disappeared, never to be found. It broke apart her family, and once Claire left home for college, she never returned. Now in her thirties, she's living in New York, trying to work as a freelance writer, when her dad calls.. Her parents are long divorced, but they still both live in Claxton, South Carolina, the same small fishing town in which Claire grew up. Her dad tells her that her mother broke her leg in a home accident, and he asks Claire if she'd be able to come home to help her get around the house and around town. Despite it being more than a decade since she forced herself back to Claxton, Claire reluctantly agrees, and before long she's on her way home.

After an initial 24 hours in at home that is awkward and strained, Claire is already beginning to think she's made a mistake. Returning to Claxton and to the house in which she grew up has dredged up suppressed memories of Natalie, and Claire finds herself looking for excuses to avoid confronting more than a decade of unresolved tension with her mother. "I'm not ready to spend the afternoon sitting in my bedroom, avoiding my mom...an entire lifetime of resentment building as the two of us dance around our problems in that way we've always done." Her conflict avoidance and memories of Natalie lead her on an impromptu excursion to Galloway Farm, a winery at which her sister used to work. Claire isn't even certain what she hopes to accomplish by visiting, but one thing leads to another, and before she knows it, she's landed a job at the winery—including room and board!—for the remainder of the summer.

However, not everything is as peachy as it seems at Galloway Farm, and when Claire finds an old diary hidden in the guest house, secrets start to emerge that force her to call into question the situation at Galloway Farm, and may even link the Farm to her sister's disappearance.

I've enjoyed Stacy Willingham's thrillers to-date, but Forget Me Not didn't hit the same notes with me, unfortunately. The book moves along at a steady clip, and once Claire finds the diary it alternates between the present and flashbacks to the time the diary was written. It's all decently compelling, but it was also surprisingly predictable. Willingham throws in a few twists, an adept talent of hers, but the novel fell apart for me with some of the choices the characters make. While no reader will agree with everything a character does, in general I think there has to be a level of "I could see why they would do that" present in order for a novel to truly work. Without spoiling the story, that piece was missing too often for me in Forget Me Not, and it prevented me from fully locking in to the story.

If you're looking for a compelling thriller or itching to read something by Stacy Willingham, try Only If You're Lucky instead. That twisty murder mystery, set on a college campus with a distinctly Mean Girls vibe, is my favorite of her previous three books. It's a better spend of your valuable reading time than Forget Me Not; this one is okay to skip.