Each night when 16 year-old Lon­don Lane goes to sleep, her whole world dis­ap­pears. In the morn­ing, all that’s left is a note telling her about a day she can’t remem­ber. The whole sce­nario doesn’t exactly make high school or dat­ing that hot guy whose name she can’t seem to recall any eas­ier. But when Lon­don starts expe­ri­enc­ing dis­turb­ing visions she can’t make sense of, she real­izes it’s time to learn a lit­tle more about the past she keeps forgetting-before it destroys her future.

Mixed feel­ings after read­ing this one. I enjoyed read­ing For­got­ten, and was quickly drawn into the story. It’s not a chal­leng­ing read and if you’re look­ing for some brief escapism, For­got­ten would be a good choice. The romance is sweet and there is a unique and inter­est­ing premise hold­ing the story together. London’s mem­ory resets it’s self every night at 4.33am. She can­not remem­ber any­thing about her past and so leaves notes for her­self to read the next morn­ing. She does, how­ever, ‘remem­ber’ cer­tain peo­ple who fea­ture in her life, if they are in her future. Because, though Lon­don can­not remem­ber her past, she can see the future in flashes.

Unfor­tu­nately, I never felt the author really explored the pos­si­bil­i­ties of some­one actu­ally hav­ing to live with no mem­ory. As you may have gath­ered from read­ing other reviews, there are a lot of plot holes and if I’m hon­est much of the story didn’t really fit together or make much sense, once you started think­ing to much about it.

One issue is the lack of back­ground given to the reader. If you haven’t read the syn­op­sis (or a review or two), you might find your­self a lit­tle lost in the begin­ning, par­tic­u­larly as Lon­don obvi­ously doesn’t really know what’s going on in her life but talks about ‘remem­ber­ing’ things. What she means, of course, is that she remem­bers things, or peo­ple, from the future. Odd choice of word and does cause some con­fu­sion in places.

Another major prob­lem with For­got­ten is that it just sort of peters out. London’s con­di­tion, par­tic­u­larly how she is able to see the future, is never explained. There is build up to a major plot-line and a twist right at the end, but rather than explor­ing this fully,  it is very rushed and clum­sily put together, so inevitably felt like it had been tacked on sim­ply to try and give the story more depth. The end­ing, sadly, was very abrupt and unsat­is­fy­ing, and read as though we are cut off in the mid­dle of a chap­ter. Sev­eral key ques­tions aren’t answered, such as why Lon­don doesn’t ever see Luke in her future (when clearly he plays a major role in her life), and then, sud­denly, she does.

For­got­ten is best enjoyed if you just go with it and take it for what it is, which, essen­tially, is a fluffy romance with a bit of a twist. Luke was a bit of a sweetie and very patient with Lon­don, but I couldn’t help think­ing that he was a lit­tle too per­fect and found Lon­don falling in love with him every day, just from read­ing some notes on him in the morn­ing telling her she was in love with him, unrealistic (not to men­tion lazy writ­ing). I could have done with some more ten­sion, some com­pli­ca­tions in their rela­tion­ship. It was too easy and I would have liked to have seen days where she wasn’t inter­ested in Luke, or doesn’t feel under­stand or accept his impor­tance in her life, rather than being besot­ted day in day out, with lit­tle to no cause. It wasn’t that the rep­e­ti­tion bored me, more that I wanted to actu­ally expe­ri­ence Lon­don falling in love and see the chal­lenges their romance would log­i­cally face, rather than read about how ‘hot’ he was.

I did find the notes unre­al­is­tic. For Lon­don to have any idea about her life, her rela­tion­ships, she would have had to have read exten­sive, detailed notes, pages and pages every morn­ing, which we never see. It didn’t work for me, nor did the fact that nobody else ever seemed to notice her con­di­tion. Surely Lon­don must have suf­fered strange mood swings and con­stant bouts of for­get­ful­ness? Frus­trat­ingly, Lon­don brings a lot of trou­ble onto her­self, for lying in her notes each night, for let­ting sit­u­a­tions with her mum and Jamie drag out with­out doing any­thing, for her. often child­ish, reac­tions. She accuses the peo­ple in her life of lying to her, but the truth is, she is lying to her­self. She com­plains about her mem­ory but then wig­gles out of fac­ing any­thing dif­fi­cult and upset­ting by pur­pose­fully leav­ing out infor­ma­tion in her notes and hid­ing things from herself.

Regard­less of the prob­lems I had, I think a lot of peo­ple will enjoy this book. There are some lovely scenes between Lon­don and Luke and the con­cept is very inter­est­ing, if not as well exe­cuted as it could have been. Worth pick­ing up in the library.