By Caroline George

“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 begins to suspect that a murderer is stalking the coastal highway 30A, and they must try to recover their memories as quickly as possible . . . before the 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..” (Goodreads).

I thought I would be more consistent with summer posting, but I guess not. It can feel annoying to post reviews sometimes – I just want to read a book and it’s hard to find time to talk about it right away without just saying the same stuff I always do. Books have really just been blending together for me, it all feels the same. It’s also really hard to find books that are both entertaining and align with my values. To be honest, it’s way too easy to just read the books with sinful content and pretend I can “eat around the poison,” but that’s just how the Enemy works. It would be really great to grow my following and get more connected with the online book community and hopefully get some better recs or Christian ARCs. I need to come up with ways to expand the Christian influence over this site and make other content as well, but being a college student comes with a lot of other stresses even over the summer. Comment below book recs or content you want to see if you made it through this rant – without further ado, let’s talk about the book.

The Summer We Forgot was forgettable. The characters, the romance, the mystery, the danger. None of it added up to make a cohesive book, let alone an entertaining one. The pacing picked up at the end and everyone had a happy ending, but my motivation to finish was more about getting done and starting a new book than enjoying the ride.

Honestly a very thin plot. I can understand amnesia from trauma to the head or something. I can even understand amnesia from a singular traumatic event. I would let that kind of repression slide for the sake of this plot, even though memory repression is a very inexact science and doesn’t make sense to occur to a whole group of people in the same way. But the way this author explained the reason the kids forgot that summer made zero sense. She couldn’t even fake her way through the science, she just gave a very rough, childlike, plot fixer answer. That just really annoyed me and I couldn’t get past it.

The Summer We Forgot is another one of those mysteries where a dynamic team of meddling kids bands together to reveal the truth (without the help of the very qualified and well-meaning law enforcement, ’cause who needs those guys anyway), but just stumble upon all the clues and only put everything together when the answer is right in front of their faces. None of the characters did much work to figure everything out, and kept getting set back by silly things. The action didn’t even pick up until the third act, leaving the first and second thirds of the book very hard to get through.

I had to suspend my disbelief for way more than just the memory repression explanation – there were so many plot holes related to the students’ relationships to each other, their families, and the gaping plot hole that I haven’t seen anyone talk about: the fact that the “summer they forgot” happened two whole summers ago? You mean to tell me that in two years, the kids got not one hint that there were pieces missing from their memory, and no one in their life slipped up and mentioned something from that time? You mean to tell me that it’s been two years since Darby and Morgan stopped being friends and Darby has spent that entire time replaying everything that happened between them, and yet never uncovered the fact that right before their falling out there were multiple weeks missing from her brain? And not only just in Darby’s case, but in the case of seven other camp counselors?

What made this book hardest to get through, however, was not the plot holes or the passivity of the mystery solving. No, it was the insufferable style. The worst of it was probably in the first few chapters, where Darby spends pages upon pages talking about how much she’s hiding and how she’s such a bad, imperfect girl. No, she’s not selling drugs, no, she’s not committing tax fraud. She just has a box full of very innocent teenage girl things she’s never shown her parents? Think pictures of her having fun with friends or slightly cropped tops. The whole beginning chapter is about this box, and then it barely comes up later, and even then only as a place where she stored her case notes. I understand the pressure to be “perfect” in some way, but introducing the whole book with what felt like a mental breakdown was overwhelming to say the least. “Overwhelming” and “underwhelming” are actually great ways to describe this book. The teenagers’ emotions and the time Caroline George spent explicating them left the reader exhausted from all of the thinking and feeling and hormones. It was underwhelming in the sense that all of the hints and clues and threats and stakes were raised so high that even if the ending had a twist strong enough to support them, they were too high to be realistic for the situation.

I just couldn’t stand the overly expositionary and internal-monologue-y writing style and it slowed the pace down a lot especially in the first acts.

I hate when authors give characters a strong and characteristic personality and then forget to give them any hopes, dreams, or even hobbies outside of “solving the mystery” or “getting the guy.” And in the case of The Summer We Forgot, the characters didn’t even have the personality going for them. In fact, I could even say character, because everyone sounded exactly the same and consistently inconsistent. The amount of times I had to reread paragraphs because I wasn’t sure if the person speaking was Morgan or Darby… It felt like everyone had both the same personality and each other’s personality at different points throughout the book. I will give the author credit though, it was a big cast and each person had their own motivation and investment in the mystery at hand.

I was not a fan of The Summer We Forgot, but that’s not to say you won’t be. I rated it at two stars for the plot holes and waaay too much internal monologuing, but the high stakes and large cast could make it a fun, light, and low-investment thriller for a rainy summer’s afternoon.