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BEFORE I FORGET
Tory Henwood Hoen
St Martin’s Press
December 2, 2025
288 pages
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This aptly named book is about a young woman guiding her father (Arthur) through the last stages of Alzheimer’s. Though it is emotional, it’s not really sad. It’s uplifting. It could be considered a manual for someone going through the experience with a loved one. I know I wish I could have read this when my mother had Alzheimer’s.
Cricket, the daughter, age mid 20s, is stuck in a bad place emotionally, due to a traumatic incident during her teen years. Spending time with her father allows her to come out of that place while enriching her father’s days at the same time. It’s such a multi-layered story as she comes to accept her past and live in her father’s present.
Instinctively, she accepts her father’s reality, rather than trying to pull him into her reality. Her father’s reality includes some clairvoyance and inner knowledge, which is surprisingly quite accurate. Some might think of it as magic realism because there is no logical explanation. I don’t really believe it was magic. It was simply Arthur’s intuitive life.
There are other supporting characters, important to the story and very realistic. They represent the population of small towns and country life very accurately. The setting is rural, on a large peaceful pond in a comfortable old cottage. My mind made it very picturesque.
I love the fact that the author has taken a subject that most people would consider dark and upsetting and turned it into an uplifting story with a hopeful ending.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the Advance Readers Copy.
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