I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book about digging up family skeletons in which the skeletons are so stubbornly buried. It takes a very long time for Elle to learn the entire story of where she came from and who her family is in The Forgotten Ones, by Steena Holmes. By the end of the book, her entire world will be turned upside down. There are answers, but there is an awful lot of heartache.
At the beginning of The Forgotten Ones, Elle is a nurse in Ontario with a mentally ill artist mother, Anna Marie. Her mother told her that her grandparents are dead. Because her mother has dissociative identity disorder, her only stability came from Grace, her mother’s caretaker and basically Elle’s second mother. This might have gone on indefinitely if Elle’s roommate hadn’t discovered that the dying man in her ward is Elle’s grandfather, David.
Anna Marie pleads with Elle not to talk to David. She wants secrets to remain secret. But Elle is too curious to leave things along. She visits David and wrangles out of him a promise to tell her about her mother and why Anna Marie hates David so much. My brain came up with plenty of reasons to explain the estrangement, but I was completely wrong about this very disturbed family. When the secrets finally come out of David and Anna Marie, I was floored.
The Forgotten Ones uses a writing trick that I find rather annoying. Especially at the beginning, Holmes uses a lot of one-sentence paragraph. This settles down after a few chapters, thankfully. And the strangeness and shock of Elle’s family’s secrets kept me going through my annoyance. In fact, I liked this book more and more as I kept reading. The Forgotten Ones ended up being a very original take on the uncovering-family-secrets subgenre. I’m glad I finished it.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 1 April 2018.