Forgotten - Cat Patrick

Author: Cat Patrick

Length: 277 pages

Release Date: June 7 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown

Blurb

Here’s the thing about me: I can see the future in flashes, like memories, but my past is blank.

I remember what I’ll wear tomorrow and an argument I won’t happen until this afternoon. But I don’t know what I ate for dinner last night. I get by using notes, my mom and best friend Jamie…

But now Jamie’s going off the rails, my mom is lying to me and I can’t see the boy I adore in my future. Today, I love him and never want to forget how much.

Review

Forgotten certainly has an interesting premise, and shows how a small spark can develop into something huge. When Cat Patrick forgot what she was doing, she never thought she would end up writing a book. Similarly, when I started reading Forgotten I never expected it to suck the life out of me. This book feels like a black hole that has been annihilating everything else in my life for days. No matter how many pages I turned, so many more seemed to lie in front of me, stretching forever onwards until I sacrificed my Saturday to blitz this bad boy.

Weirdly, the story itself was extremely decent. I wanted to find out about how London dealt with her rare condition, what secrets were hiding in her past rather than her future. It just seemed that Patrick’s book took forever to finish; perhaps it was the pacing, perhaps I just wasn’t concentrating for long enough on the story; I am not sure, but what I am sure of is that by the end of the book I realised that I had enjoyed Forgotten; it was a good book with an interesting plot and decent characters, though I cannot say my opinion was not tainted by the lengths by which I had to go to reach that final page. All I can say is that I’m finished now and am pretty satisfied with the end result.

Let’s get one thing straight; I hated

London Lane

as a protagonist. I just could not connect with this character; she seemed to have no interests, goals or hobbies by which to define her. What this character appears to be is a vessel for the plot, which may be okay for some readers, but I found it jarring and awkward. There was nothing about London other than her condition that allowed us a window into the true character. Overall, London was a serious let down; she damaged the plot by being nothing but a mouthpiece for the main elements of the novel, lacking a sense of self or persona for the reader to connect with.

Other than this flaw however, Forgotten’s characters were both interesting and well rounded. Jamie, Luke and Bridgette were fairly intriguing creations, whilst London’s abilities allowed us more of a luck at them that of herself. There were a few nice plot twists in Forgotten too; things that I seriously never saw coming that hit me like a brick wall. You know how much I love plot twists and the final seventy pages or so of Forgotten was rife with them!

The romantic elements of a book are the parts that I tend to review most harshly. I hate it when characters are falling over each other proclaiming their love after meeting for two minutes; that is a real turn off for me as it is unrealistic and shows that the book is simply the author’s high school romance fantasy that was better off staying in their imaginations. I enjoy romances that are dark, built upon a basis of lust and mutual respect; the romance in Forgotten seemed slap bang in the middle of the two extremes. Luke and London were not suddenly drooling over how perfect the other was and how they couldn’t live without the other, but there wasn’t so much of a slow build, more of a lurch forward in time so that the sugary stuff could start. Luke and London’s romance was above all believable; they fought, they made up, their feelings were growing for each other; just how most romances are, though at times Luke did appear more interested in ears that in London!

Overall, Forgotten was not a bad read, just a long one. For a debut novel, Patrick’s effort is more than respectable and I look forward to more from this author as her writing matures. When it comes to Forgotten, what I can say is that the book was let down by an anonymous lead, but lifted by a fascinating idea and fairly good secondary characters. At the end of the day Forgotten was not a disappointment, but it did not live up to the expectations that I had placed on it.

Dusty :]