Forget Me Not

Author: Stacy Willingham Title: Forget Me Not Publisher: Minotaur Books Date Published: 08/26/2025

Read Dates: 07/18/2025- 07/19/2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

 📖 I received a gifted e-book ARC. The following is my honest review✍🏻

Forget Me Not is a dual timeline, dual POV thriller. The modern-day chapters are told from the perspective of Claire, a freelance journalist who returns home for the first time since she was 18 when her mother is injured. She has avoided home and the memories of her sister, who had gone missing as a teen, but now feels drawn to feel closer to her sister. She takes a part-time job at a vineyard her sister once worked at, and there uncovers a journal hidden for 40 years. The journal offers the second POV/timeline, telling the story of a young girl named Marcia in the early 80s.

I got caught up in this one right away! I loved the glimpses to the past that the journal provided, the parallels between Marcia’s journal in the 80s and Claire’s memories of her sister in the early 2000's. I had a lot of guesses to the various twists and turns, and some of them panned out while others were off the mark. Definitely another great read from Stacy Willingham.

Twenty-two years ago, Claire Campbell’s older sister, Natalie, disappeared shortly after her eighteenth birthday. Days later, her blood was found in a car, a man was arrested, and the case was swiftly closed. In the decades since, Claire has attempted to forget her traumatic past by moving to the city and climbing the ranks as an investigative journalist... until an unexpected call from her father forces her to come back home and face it all anew.

With the entire summer now looming ahead—a summer spent with nothing to do in her childhood home, with her estranged mother—Claire decides on a whim to accept a seasonal job at Galloway Farm, a muscadine vineyard in coastal South Carolina less than an hour away from where she grew up. At first glance, Galloway is an idyllic escape for Claire. A scenic retreat full of slow-paced nostalgia, as well as a place where her sister seemed truly happy in that last summer before she vanished, it feels like the perfect plan to pass the time. However, as soon as Claire starts to settle in, she stumbles across an old diary written by one of the vineyard's owners, and what at first seems like a story of young rebellion and love turns into something much more sinister as it begins to describe details of various unsolved crimes. As the days stretch on, Claire finds herself becoming more and more secluded as she starts to obsess over the diary's contents… as well as the lingering feeling that her own sister's disappearance may be somehow tied to it all.

Galloway was supposed to be a place to help her move forward, but instead, Claire quickly finds herself immersed in her own dark and dangerous past.