Before I Forget - Tory Henwood Hoen - ★★

AUTHOR: Tory Henwood Hoen

NARRATOR: Barrie Kreinik

GENRE: Contemporary Drama

PUBLICATION DATE: December 2, 2025

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A contemporary drama partly focussing on memory and memories. Expected to like this much more, but it felt more like a Hallmark depiction of Alzheimer’s. Many of the plot inclusions weren't my cup of tea. This is an outlier opinion.

Plot Preview:

Though twenty-six-year-old Cricket is doing decently at her job with a modern wellness company, she feels like she is weighed down under the burdens of a past tragedy and of a present worry: her father’s Alzheimer’s has worsened. When her elder sister Nina declares that they need to move their dad Arthur into a hospice-care facility, Cricket decides to use his health as the catalyst she needed to make a change in her life. She quits her job and moves to their home in the Adirondacks to become Arthur’s caregiver, and in the process, hopes to heal the old rift between them, though he doesn’t remember it. As Cricket settles into her new role, she soon discovers that her father has a special gift: as he forgets his past, he can predict the future. What next!?

The story comes to us in Cricket’s first-person perspective from two timelines: past and present.

As a person who constantly judges books by their covers, I didn’t even give this book a second glance. The loon on the cover (well, I first thought it was a duck! 🤭) made me think that it was some kind of literary work, which I wasn’t in the mood for. But when my GR friends started showering 5 stars for its emotional plotline and its depiction of Alzheimer’s, I succumbed to the FOMO. While some of the content indeed grabbed me, a lot of it wasn’t my cup of tea, partly because I hadn’t anticipated the book to have those inclusions. The character development is its least impressive feature.

I am currently a caregiver for my dad who is also suffering from dementia, though he isn't at the advanced stage that Arthur is in. So to some extent, I appreciate the portrayal of dementia and the struggles of caregiving in this novel. It is a mostly tiring and often thankless job, and the book captures SOME of the frustrations accurately. However, it also makes caregiving sound more like a vacation than a vocation; the major challenges are conveniently glossed over.

Arthur is easily the best character of the book. Wise and loving, he is the kind of father every girl would love to have. I absolutely loved his joie de vivre. However, I didn’t find the depiction of his dementia realistic. Though I am willing to concede that dementia affects people differently, I wish his character development had included at least some of the darker consequences of this stupid disease.

I liked Cricket at first, but once she decided to use her father as “an oracle”, I lost all respect for her. No matter her justifications, she was still using an old man with an uncertain state of mind to guide strangers towards betterment – who does that?! It puts both her dad and the strangers at risk, albeit for different reasons.

The book is described as ‘coming of age’ in several places, but to me, Cricket never really *came of age*. It’s just that luck turned in her favour by the end. Also, most of her personality is of one who enjoys interacting with other people, so I almost laughed in disbelief when, in the final quarter, she suddenly claims to be an introvert. There was nothing introverted about her behaviour throughout the story!

I didn’t expect the story to come through two timelines. The older timeline reveals to us Cricket’s past loss, with romance as a key subplot. This might interest readers who like reading young romances, but to me, the entire love story was weak. Cricket’s behaviour in this timeline was somewhat entitled, and contained two very questionable decisions that I just didn’t agree with. As such, despite the presence of one well-written emotional scene, I didn’t like the past timeline at all.

Obviously, to compensate for the past sadness, there is the expected new romance in the contemporary timeline. This love track, which comes way too late in the book, feels forced in. Just imagine: a character has no job and no future security to speak of, and the plot is still determined to find her a love partner first. 🤦🏻‍♀️

The whole clairvoyance thingy also bugged me. It is an unexpected inclusion that seems different at first but soon turns ridiculous. I like magical realism, but reading it in a book that I thought was about dementia and caregiving annoyed me more. (Part of the blame lies on me for not reading the complete blurb, but with so many blurbs *spoilering* books, I rarely read them entirely these days.) The prophecy mumbo-jumbo took away from the actual challenges of Alzheimer’s and I found myself aligning with Nina in her stance against the whole shenanigan. Patients with dementia/Alzheimers need stability and routine, not random strangers popping in for advice. The small saving grace was that Cricket didn’t charge for Arthur’s “services”.

The book doesn’t even depict both sides of this dementia-prophecy angle. Though Arthur has advanced dementia, he conveniently functions well when it comes to being an oracle. There’s not a single scene where he is not in the right frame of mind to make his predictions, or when he fumbles and makes an inaccurate estimation. A very lopsided portrayal, this! Further, though the oracle track becomes a major subplot of the book, we rarely get to see Arthur in action. As the story is in Cricket’s first-person POV, we see his interactions with the clients only when Cricket is in the same room, which isn't often. The rest of the time, we only hear from Cricket about her plans for “the oracle”. The book tries hard to make Cricket sound noble in this endeavour, but I just can't agree: I found her exploitative!

I found Cricket’s elder sister Nina more relatable at the start. As the elder daughter who had to compromise on her goals to care for her father for many years before Cricket took over caregiving, Nina won my respect. One line in the book states, ‘Eldest daughters carry the weight of the whole family on their shoulders’, and as an elder daughter myself, I was hit hard by the truth of this sentiment. Call this my elder-daughter bias, but I don’t like how the book indirectly rates Cricket’s go-with-the-flow caregiving higher than Nina’s disciplined efforts of five years. Nina deserved way more credit than the book gave her. Cricket didn’t sacrifice anything when she came to take care of her father; Nina did. Unfortunately, Nina also didn’t click for me later because of one major inconsistency in her character detailing.

Some of the secondary characters are good, but many of them are also one-noted, with barely any depth to their sketching. Dominic the cat is a good addition to the cast. Gemma is not; her role later in the story is as annoying as the oracle track.

The prose is good, with some thought-provoking lines. I enjoyed the portrayal of the Adirondacks and of Arthur’s love for country living. It takes a while to understand the significance of the loons, but once it comes up, we understand why the cover has a loon on it. The question is: will such a cover art appeal to people who have no idea what the book is about? Will they be able to gauge the right genre of the book from the cover?

The ending has its beauty but is also too neat in certain aspects.

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at a little more than 9 hrs, is narrated by the experienced and talented Barrie Kreinik. She does a commendable job, infusing the narration with the right amount of modulation and emotion. If the plot interests you, the audio version is a great option, as long as you don't get bogged down by dual timelines. The years are mentioned at the start of each past-timeline chapter, if that helps.

Basically, this book has a good mix of things to offer, some of which worked for me and some didn’t. I liked Arthur’s character and some part of the portrayal of Alzheimer’s and the challenges of caregiving. But I didn’t like the overall poor character development and the dual timelines, and hated the whole prophecy track. The start was rock solid, but after a point, it just lost my interest.

Then again, mine is very much an outlier opinion. Of all my GR friends who have read this book, a vast majority found it an emotional and even uplifting read worth 5 stars. So please do read the other reviews before you take a final call on this work. If you are more open to the idea of prophecies in an otherwise realistic topic and to the inclusion of romance in a non-romance work, this book might work better for you. I think the crux of my problem is: I wanted a story about Arthur but I got a story about Cricket. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Recommended to readers looking for a Hallmark-style story about the complexities of growing up. Helps if you are intrigued by the clairvoyance angle. Don’t pick this up if you want a realistic story of dementia/Alzheimer’s; the realism in this story is minimal.

2 stars, mostly for Arthur and the narrator.

My thanks to Macmillan Audio for providing the ALC of “Before I Forget” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook. Sorry this didn’t work better for me.