Afternoon Everyone,

Happy weekend and happy Sunday. The official day of rest. I am so looking forward to having nothing to do for the rest of today. I’ve finished this book this morning so I’m going to get my review done now. I’ve got a workout done and nowI can spend all of the remainder of the day, sat on my backside, reading and having cwtches with my dogs. What more can I ask for from life?!

Book 📖

Thank you to @hqstories for this advanced copy of Never Forget You by @fionalucasauthor in return for an honest review. Never Forget You was published on 27th October 2022 and you can get a copy here.

Description 🔖

Lili and Ben meet by complete chance one summer in London in a beautiful public garden. The timing isn’t right though as their lives are about to head in completely different directions. And so they agree to meet in the same garden, in a years time and hopefully pick up from where they left off. However one of them won’t turn up.

Five years later, Ben still thinks about the amazing woman he met in London and questions how it managed to go so wrong between them. Until a strange woman turns up in his small Scottish town called Alice. She has no idea why she is there and she has no memory of how she got there. The only clue to her identity is the small bee pendant she wears on a chain; the very same one Ben bought for Lili all those years ago.

General Thoughts 🤔

I won’t lie, it was the cover that initially drew me to this book. It was bright and eye catching and I immediately knew that this was a book I would want to read. Once I started the book, I immediately realised that the cover was hiding something deeper and definitely sadder than I expected beneath. I think I was expecting something light and airy and don’t get me wrong, there were moments of this, but there were also really sad and heartbreaking moments. I didn’t know what I was getting into but I loved it all the same.

Characters 👫👭👬

I love books that have a character that I can deeply dislike and feel disdain for. I don’t know why I like it, but I do. Justin was that character for me, what an absolute A hole that guy was. It was frustrating and heartbreaking to read that Lili just could not see that how he was treating her was wrong and she continued to cater to him and go along with his unreasonable requests. I felt so deeply sorry for her. Everything happened so gradually that it must have felt completely normal to her.

On the flip side, what a hero Lili’s sister was. She saw Justin for what he was pretty much from the off, but that obviously put her in a tricky position. I didn’t totally agree with her decision making towards the end of the story, but I think her heart was in the right place and she more than redeemed herself.

Conclusion & Scoring ✍️

This is the first book I have read by this author and I am very happy to have been introduced to her writing. I really enjoyed the flow of the story and I think that she paced it perfectly. Jumping between timelines is one of my favourite writing styles so I loved that this book was covering multiple timelines at the same time, before they came together at the end.

My favourite thing about Fiona Lucas’ writing was the way that she wrote the characters and their relationships. The book had a mix of characters that were loveable, but flawed, awful but sometimes kind. I think that it was this that brought out some horrible relationships and some absolutely beautiful relationships that kept the book engaging and had me hooked.

Conclusion & Scoring 🎖

Do not let the cover of this book deceive you! Yes it does have it’s moments of pure, heart warming love between characters, but it also has some difficult to read chapters and characters that you will be happy to close the book on and never speak of again. I’d love to see a sequel to this book and find out what happens next. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Never Forget You and I think that if you like to feel like you’re on an emotional rollercoaster, you will too.

😍😍😍😍😩