All Is Not Forgotten by Wendy Walker
My rating: 4/5 cats
this book is total book club bait.
which sounds like the kind of thing a booksnobby type would say as they thumb-nosed the middlebrow, but no one’s likely to ever accuse ME of being a booksnob, so it should be clear that i’m only saying that this is one of those jodi picoult type of ripped-from-the-headlines, issue-based books which is full of ethical arguments just waiting to be had between its readers. in this case, the book is preceding the headlines a bit, as the memory-eradicating drug therapy used as treatment for ptsd is part of the emerging research and technology in memory science and is not yet being employed in the civilian world, but the plot isn’t the crazy science fiction it would have seemed in the not-so-distant past. which makes it the perfect time to start the conversation about the value we place on our memories – both the beautiful and the painful, and what the psychological advantages/disadvantages are in suppressing memories of trauma, and what factors influence how these choices are made.
it’s definitely a psychological novel, but it’s neither a psychological thriller nor psychological suspense. there are certainly crimes committed between its covers, and the underlying “whodunnit” question, but its pacing is much slower and more meditative, marking this as one of those “what would you do in this situation?” discussion-springboards than an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride. it’s a slow-burn suspense novel, and one which peeks underneath that glossy suburban shine to uncover the secrets holding up the happy neighbor veneer.
the biggest obstacle i think readers may have with this book is the voice. the narrator is dr. forrester, a psychiatrist treating several of the book’s characters and therefore better-informed than any of the characters individually and certainly more so than the police. the story is delivered in a very clinical tone, with frequent interruptions which detour from the action in order to explore cognitive or psychological functions, provide definitions or drop ancillary exposition. it’s a dangerous thing for an author to do – it risks losing the audience to zzzzz, but if you stick with it, and you can get past this rather distancing technique, there’s a lot of good story to chew on. dr. forrester isn’t necessarily an unreliable narrator, but he’s definitely a controlling narrator who knows more than he’s saying, but never fear – he will eventually reveal all, just on his own timeline. at first, the voice annoyed me, because i felt like i was being held at arm’s length and not allowed in to the story, but it’s like reading a book written in dialect – once you get into it, it becomes more natural, and i found several of the densely-detailed asides fascinating.
this book doesn’t come out until august 2016, which is like a million years away, in booknerd time, so i’m a little hesitant to go into too much more detail. even though i’ve historically been pretty mattress-tag-cavalier with my reviewing of arcs and so far no one has come to my house to yell at me for not following the rules of etiquette around when to post and quotations and suchlike, since it is SO far out this time, i’m gonna behave.
warnings to those with rape-triggers – there are some very descriptive passages that may be too graphic for those with their own ptsd situations.
3.5, we’ll call it four.
