Forget This Ever Happened

Forget This Ever Happened
Author: Cassandra Rose Clarke
Publisher: Holiday House
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0823448762

Sometimes there's a town called Indianola. And sometimes there isn't. A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year June, 1993. Claire has been dumped in rural Indianola, Texas, to spend her whole vacation taking care of mean, sickly Grammy. There's nothing too remarkable about Indianola: it's run-down, shabby, and sweltering, a pin-dot on the Gulf Coast. Except there is something remarkable. Memories shimmer and change. Lizards whisper riddles under the pecan trees. People disappear as if they never existed. Yesterday keeps coming unspooled, like a video tape. And worst of all, a red-lightning storm from beyond our world may just wipe the whole town off the map, if Claire and her maybe-girlfriend Julie can't stop it. Because reality doesn't apply in Indianola. Indianola is not supposed to exist. Surprising, brilliant, and, like, totally tight, Forget This Ever Happened is speculative horror at its finest, featuring a queer romance from a Pushcart Prize-nominated queer author and dark, dazzling world-building.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened

Let's Pretend This Never Happened
Author: Jenny Lawson
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2012-04-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101573082

The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside

You'll Forget This Ever Happened

You'll Forget This Ever Happened
Author: Laura L. Engel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2022-05-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1647423503

Mississippi, 1967. It’s the Summer of Love, yet unwed mothers’ maternity homes are flourishing, secret closed adoptions are routine, and many young women still have no voice. In You’ll Forget This Ever Happened, Laura Engel takes us back to the Deep South during the turbulent 1960s to explore the oppression of young women who have committed the socially unacceptable crime of becoming pregnant without a ring on their finger. After being forced to give up her newborn son for adoption, Engel lives inside a fortress of silent shame for fifty years—but when her secret son finds her and her safe world is cracked open, those walls crumble. Are you still a mother even if you have not raised your child? Can the mother/child bond survive years of separation? How deep is the damage caused by buried family secrets and shame? Engel asks herself these and many other questions as she becomes acquainted with the son she never knew, and seeks the acceptance and forgiveness she has long denied herself. Full of both aching sadness and soaring joy, You’ll Forget This Ever Happened is a shocking exposé of a shameful part of our country’s recent past—and a poignant tale of a mother’s enduring love.

Sometimes I Lie

Sometimes I Lie
Author: Alice Feeney
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2018-03-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250144833

My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?

The Summer We Forgot

The Summer We Forgot
Author: Caroline George
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2022-03-08
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0785236228

Caroline George once again transports readers with lush, evocative prose, leading them to ask the question: what happens when we can’t even trust ourselves? Some memories are better left forgotten. Darby and Morgan haven’t spoken for two years, and their friend group has splintered. But when the body of their former science teacher is found in the marsh where they attended camp that summer, they realize they have more questions than answers . . . and even fewer memories. No one remembers—or no one is talking. The group of reunited friends suspects that a murderer is stalking the coastal highway 30A, and they are desperate to recover their memories as quickly as possible . . . before their history they can’t remember repeats itself. Everyone has a secret. As tensions rise and time runs out, Darby and Morgan begin to wonder if they can believe one another . . . or if they can even trust themselves. Young Adult suspense with romance Stand-alone novel Book length: 95,000 words Includes discussion questions for book clubs

Forget You Know Me

Forget You Know Me
Author: Jessica Strawser
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250184479

The next “masterful” (Publishers Weekly) novel from "the gifted Jessica Strawser" (Adriana Trigiani), hailed as “immensely satisfying” (Kathleen Barber) and “that book you can’t put down” (Sally Hepworth). A video call between friends captures a shocking incident no one was supposed to see. The secrets it exposes threaten to change their lives forever. Molly and Liza have always been enviably close. Even after Molly married Daniel, the couple considered Liza an honorary family member. But after Liza moved away, things grew more strained than anyone wanted to admit—in the friendship and the marriage. When Daniel goes away on business, Molly and Liza plan to reconnect with a nice long video chat after the kids are in bed. But then Molly leaves the room to check on a crying child. What Liza sees next will change everything. Only one thing is certain: Molly needs her. Liza drives all night to be at Molly’s side—but when she arrives, the reception is icy, leaving Liza baffled and hurt. She knows there’s no denying what she saw. Or is there? In disbelief that their friendship could really be over, Liza is unaware she’s about to have a near miss of her own. And Molly, refusing to deal with what’s happened, won’t turn to Daniel, either. But none of them can go on pretending. Not after this. Forget You Know Me is a “twisty, emotionally complex, powder keg of a tale” (bestselling author Emily Carpenter) about the wounds of people who’ve grown apart. Best friends, separated by miles. Spouses, hardened by neglect. A mother, isolated by pain. One moment will change things for them all. "[A] great hybrid of women's fiction and suspense...strong character development and unpredictable plot." - Library Journal

This Has Happened

This Has Happened
Author: Piera Sonnino
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2014-12-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1466887044

Five years after her return home from Auschwitz, Piera Sonnino found the courage to tell the story of the extermination of her parents, three brothers, and two sisters by the Nazis. Discovered in 2005 in Italy and first published in English in 2006, this poignant and extraordinarily well-written account is strikingly accurate in bringing to life the methodical and relentless erosion of the freedoms and human dignity of the Italian Jews, from Mussolini's racial laws of 1938 to the institutionalized horror of Auschwitz. Through Sonnino's words, memory has the power to disarm these unspeakable evils, in This Has Happened.

The Woman Who Can't Forget

The Woman Who Can't Forget
Author: Jill Price
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2008-12-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1847376010

Jill Price has the first diagnosed case of a memory condition called "hyperthymestic syndrome" -- the continuous, automatic, autobiographical recall of every day of her life since she was fourteen. Give her any date from that year on, and she can almost instantly tell you what day of the week it was, what she did on that day, and any major world event or cultural happening that took place, as long as she heard about it that day. Her memories are like scenes from home movies, constantly playing in her head, backward and forward, through the years; not only does she make no effort to call her memories to mind, she cannot stop them. The Woman Who Can't Forgetis the beautifully written and moving story of Jill's quest to come to terms with her extraordinary memory, living with a condition that no one understood, including her, until the scientific team who studied her finally charted the extraordinary terrain of her abilities. As we learn of Jill's struggles first to realize how unusual her memory is and then to contend, as she grows up, with the unique challenges of not being able to forget -- remembering both the good times and the bad, the joyous and the devastating, in such vivid and insistent detail -- the way her memory works is contrasted to a wealth of discoveries about the workings of normal human memory and normal human forgetting. Intriguing light is shed on the vital role of what's called "motivated forgetting"; as well as theories about childhood amnesia, the loss of memory for the first two to three years of our lives; the emotional content of memories; and the way in which autobiographical memories are normally crafted into an ever-evolving and empowering life story.

Like It Never Happened

Like It Never Happened
Author: Emily Adrian
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2015-06-02
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0698185498

Stereotypes, sexuality, and destructive rumors collide in this smart YA novel for fans of Sara Zarr’s Story of a Girl, Siobhan Vivian’s The List, and E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. When Rebecca Rivers lands the lead in her school’s production of The Crucible, she gets to change roles in real life, too. She casts off her old reputation, grows close with her four rowdy cast-mates, and kisses the extremely handsome Charlie Lamb onstage. Even Mr. McFadden, the play’s critical director, can find no fault with Rebecca. Though “The Essential Five” vow never to date each other, Rebecca can’t help her feelings for Charlie, leaving her both conflicted and lovestruck. But the on and off-stage drama of the cast is eclipsed by a life-altering accusation that threatens to destroy everything…even if some of it is just make believe.