Forget About it

by Caprice Crane

[Leah]

I’ve been wanting to read Forget About It for ages. Absolutely ages. I absolutely loved the sound of it, but I only got around to buying the book with an Amazon voucher a few weeks ago. I don’t really know what held me back from buying it before. Probably because there were other books I really wanted to read and also because I’ve never read one of Caprice’s books so I wasn’t entirely sure she was my kind of author. I finally took the plunge though, and bought myself a cheap second hand copy and I was thrilled when it arrived. One weekend I was looking for something fairly easy to read and picked up Forget About It and I must admit I’m a bit torn.

The first thing I want to say is that Forget About It is an inspired plot. Yes it’s similar to the Kinsella novel Remember Me? along with the Cecelia-Ahern-part-created TV show Samantha Who? but it’s different because Jordan chooses amnesia. It’s not forced upon her, she chooses to do it in a bid to change her life. Personally I think it’s a brilliant idea for a novel and I thought Crane executed it well for the most part. It wasn’t entirely what I expected, the faux-amnesia wasn’t what I expected it to be, and there’s an even bigger plot-changer about 100-120 pages before the end of the novel. It does become a bit of a soap opera during those last pages, with some OMG moments and moments where I wanted to strangle Jordan merely because she wasn’t aware of the real truth about all of these people around her.

I must say, the book wasn’t as funny as I expected it to be either. Yes, I did laugh out loud a few times but I was expecting a laugh a minute. I follow Caprice on Twitter and she’s hilarious, so I kind of expected Forget About It to follow that. I also found some of the relationships during the novel to be lacking. The relationship between Jordan and Todd was very real to me, and Crane set it up wonderfully, with a brilliant confession-type scene early-ish on in the novel but that never panned out. At all. It was almost as if we were all set up to believe it was going to happen and I was mightily disappointed we didn’t get any sort of closure on the issue. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when an author throws us a curveball and gives us an unexpected ending, but when I get my hopes up for a couple and it doesn’t pan out, it sucks. I liked Travis as much as the next guy but I was invested in Jordan and Todd as a couple.

One thing Crane really excels at is making us love her characters. I loved Jordan. I get that what she does is nuts and a bit deceitful, but I lapped it up. Most of the people she fakes to deserve it anyway – her mother and sister and Dirk her horrible boyfriend along with her work colleagues – so it made it very easy for me to accept Jordan doing that. I didn’t think it was immoral or anything, in fact I was willing her own to fool them all, that’s how horrible most of the people around Jordan were. Cat and Todd, Jordan’s best friends were amazing. I’ve already professed my love for Todd above, but Cat was amazing and I’d have loved to have seen more of her, she was just the best friend you could ever ask for. Like I’ve said, Jordan’s family weren’t exactly anything to be proud of, her sister is cruel, her mother barely cares and the only member of Jordan’s family I liked was her step-dad Walter. Dirk was just plain old horrible, the less said about him the better. As for Travis, I liked him, I really did. Just, you know, not as much as I liked Todd.

The entire book was told from Jordan’s point-of-view, which works perfectly for Forget About It. For the most part I loved the book, I really did. It started well, the plot was inspiring and I loved Jordan and her friends. I loved how the faux-amnesia allowed Jordan to come into her own and be the boss for a change. But it all disintegrated with the big plot twist because although it wasn’t Jordan’s fault, I was annoyed at her for just blindly following Dirk despite the fact people told her otherwise. It made me quite angtsy in fact and I couldn’t wait for her to snap out of it, as I knew she inevitably would. I really wanted to love every page of this novel, and I think my expectations were possibly a little high, all my own fault of course. I would recommend the book because for the most part it’s good but I was also let down by parts of it. I still can’t get over the Jordan/Todd situation, it’s like it was all there, it was all set up, and then nothing. It has not, however, put me off reading the rest of Caprice Crane’s novels, I’ll definitely be picking up her other books as she definitely has huge talent as an author.