Sunday Synopsis

Everything She Forgot by Lisa Ballantyne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The premise of this book was quite cliche'. A woman in a car accident, Margaret, AKA Molly, is saved by a mysterious stranger with severe burns. She discovers, long after the reader has figured it out, that he is her real father, George, who abducted her when she was a child with only the best of intentions. He was her dad, after all, and still in love with her mother although the mother was forced to move on.

Other characters include the "holier than thou" religious nutcase reporter who wants to capture George the abductor and become famous for his articles on the case. Then there is Molly's mother that George was truly in love with and her new husband, Molly's stepfather. The mother was in love with George when she became pregnant, but her parents would not let them marry. They whisked her away to have the baby and married her off to another man. Why? George's family, the McGlaughlins, were small town gangsters, feared, and rightly so, by everyone in town. George was the black sheep of the family. He didn't want any part of the family "business," but he was guilty by association.

So, the book is all about revealing Margaret's past, which she had forgotten. She remembers, slowly, through items that her mother kept in a box that Margaret retrieves from the attic after her mother passes away. The story is told well, just rather slowly. I believe the same story could have been written in half the time without compromising anything we learn about the characters and their motives. There was quite a bit of repetition and some materials that was completely irrelevant.

The British/Scottish vocabulary was a bit hard to get accustomed to, but it was actually one of the best reasons for reading the book.

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