"Every time I saw her, I wanted to keep seeing her. I wanted to keep talking to her about anything and everything, wanted to reach out and touch her for any reason. Just the feel of her arm under my hand was enough to ease my craving for another day. But I wanted more. I needed more. I wanted her to feel the same way."--Forget Me Not, L.T. Smith
I honestly don't know how to do Forget Me Not justice. Not only is it so beautifully written and emotionally deep I struggle for words to capture it all adequately, the story's voice is so personal, so openly vulnerable I felt almost as I should look away while reading.
It takes a brave and very talented writer to handle such painful and delicate topics as Alzheimer's and romantic love, especially one who puts them in the same story. But it's precisely because main character Cathy Turner has faced so much, been such a good daughter, never once thinking of herself, that she deserves to find the happiness that has been shut out of her life for so long.
L.T. Smith doesn't just understand what true love is, she understands how much wanting to find it with someone else is a physical ache, not of the body, but of the heart and the soul. She understands the self-doubting, hurting woman who, even though she thinks she doesn't deserve it, most definitely does deserve love.
Her writing is lovely, endearing and real and that's not just rare in lesbian fiction, it's rare in fiction, period. Her trademark charming humor ("I could only hope that 'bedraggled' had become chic.") is here, but it's quieter and infused with the sadness that comes from grief and seeing a loved one go through something no one should ever have to face.
The kind of writer who creates women you wish you could meet in real life is a writer whose next titles you breathlessly await.
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