Friday 9 September 2016

Book Review - Forgotten by Heleyne Hammersley

Amazon UK
Title: Forgotten
Author: Heleyne Hammersley
Format reviewed: Ebook
Source: Author supplied review copy
Publisher: Bloodhound Books
Publication Date: 29th April 2016
Rating: 4 Stars


What if you woke up in a strange place and didn’t know who you were?

A woman wakes up in a Thai hospital unaware of how she got there or who she is. The doctor names her Kai, the Thai word for fever.

Unable to recall what led her to end up at the bottom of a cliff, Kai’s only clue to her identity is a diary. Stuck in a foreign land with no memory, she begins to unpick the truth about her past. And she will discover who she is and why she is in danger…

This is Kai’s story.

Forgotten is a a bit of a mixture of a story. It is certainly intriguing, interesting and fascinating  but at the same time, since its being advertised as a psychological thriller, for me it was missing the must read sensation, and the the overall climax which you may expect to be thrilling, was to me anti climatic. 

However what I absolutely loved was Kai's journal, where she is explaining her travels in the Far East up to the point before she has her accident and develops amnesia. The majority of the story is told through the journal entries, and takes you on a trip through China, Laos and parts of Thailand, visiting temples, and all the while hinting at things in Kai's past that are unsavoury, and the reason for her being on the trip. 

There are some chapters that hint at a current threat, but its made fairly obvious to an experienced reader just who the threat is, but I was still curious to see how it would all play out. 

Kai though is not the most reliable of narrators in the present tense, due to her amnesia. It is hard to tell exactly what she is genuinely remembering and what she is reading in her journal. The doctors at the hospital try to help, but I just had the sense of mistrust about everything from Kai. 

Forgotten was an interesting read, but as I say I feel it was slightly confused as to what sort of book it was. To me it read like a travelogue with the added intrigue of some danger, which I did like, but I kind of would have loved to have a larger sense of danger, and for those chapters to either be more frequent, or expanded. 

The ending almost felt a bit rushed, and after a run of books where I have been wishing they were shorter, in this case I would have loved it to have been longer, just so that some of themes could have been developed further. 

Thank you so much to Heleyne Hammersley for this review copy. This was my honest opinion. 

Please do check out Heleyne on Truth or Lie which has also gone live today! 

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