Kristin Harmel -- The Sweetness of Forgetting -- Gables

Start: Aug 17 2012 8:00 pm

In The Sweetness of Forgetting (Gallery, $15) by Kristin Harmel, a divorced mother of a surly not-quite-teenage girl, runs her family bakery on Cape Cod, but is starting to wonder what might have been. What if she hadn’t abandoned her dreams of law school? What if she hadn't quit her job to raise her daughter? What if she hadn’t caught her husband cheating on her with a clichéd blonde bimbo? When her aging grandmother, Rose, summons her to hear a long-held secret, Hope finally has the opportunity to stop thinking “what if?” and start thinking “what now?” Rose’s memory is ebbing rapidly due to the onset of Alzheimer’s, and she knows she doesn’t have much time left to tell Hope the truth about a secret she’s kept for seventy years. Giving Hope nothing but a list of names, Rose sends her on a journey of discovery that takes Hope to a synagogue and a mosque in Paris, to a history buried in the Holocaust, and the story of a love long thought buried.