There’s something profoundly unsettling about watching a parent forget who you are. In Tory Henwood Hoen’s sophomore novel Before I Forget, twenty-six-year-old Cricket Campbell confronts this heartbreak head-on when she returns to her family’s Adirondack lake house to care for her father Arthur, who is slipping deeper into Alzheimer’s disease. What begins as an act of filial duty transforms into something far more unexpected—a meditation on grief, healing, and the peculiar gifts that arrive when we least expect them.
Hoen, whose debut The Arc explored contemporary romance with wit and insight, shifts registers here to deliver a more contemplative work that blends literary fiction with touches of magical realism. The result is a novel that feels both achingly real and quietly enchanted, much like the liminal space Cricket herself occupies throughout the narrative.
The Weight of What We Carry
Cricket arrives at Catwood Pond carrying more than luggage. A decade earlier, her first love Seth died in a New Year’s Eve snowmobile accident—a tragedy for which she has spent years blaming herself. The guilt calcified into a directionless adulthood: she drifted through dead-end jobs, hollow relationships, and a general state of what she calls “perma-funk.” When her older sister Nina—pregnant and living in Sweden—announces plans to move Arthur into memory care, Cricket seizes the opportunity to intervene. Perhaps by caring for her father, she reasons, she can repair their strained relationship and shake herself from her emotional paralysis.
What Cricket doesn’t anticipate is how deeply familiar places hold their ghosts. Catwood Pond, once her sanctuary, now pulses with memories she’s spent years avoiding. Hoen captures this duality beautifully, rendering the Adirondack setting with prose that’s both spare and evocative. The lake house isn’t merely a backdrop but a character itself—weathered, intimate, haunted by what was and what might have been.
When Forgetting Becomes Seeing
The novel’s most compelling conceit emerges gradually: as Arthur loses his grip on the past, he appears to gain an uncanny ability to glimpse the future. At first, Cricket dismisses these moments as coincidence or confusion. But as Arthur’s predictions prove eerily accurate—from the arrival of loons to more significant life events—Cricket begins to wonder if dementia has stripped away some barrier between her father and deeper truths.
This is where Hoen takes her biggest risk, and it largely pays off. The magical realism here is understated, woven so subtly into the fabric of the story that readers may debate whether Arthur possesses genuine prophetic abilities or whether Cricket is simply finding meaning in randomness. Hoen wisely refuses to provide definitive answers, allowing the ambiguity to serve the novel’s larger themes about the stories we tell ourselves and the truths we divine from uncertainty.
The Oracle Project: Strengths and Stumbles
When Cricket transforms Arthur into “the Oracle at Catwood Pond”—complete with ceremonial tea, cold plunges, and choreographed meditations—the novel shifts into more precarious territory:
- The Setup: With help from neighbors Carl and Paula, Cricket creates an elaborate ritual around Arthur’s prophecies, welcoming visitors seeking guidance
- The Evolution: What begins as an experiment becomes a regional phenomenon, attracting pilgrims from across the country
- The Complications: When Cricket’s former boss Gemma arrives with plans to commercialize and digitize the oracle, Cricket must confront questions about exploitation, legacy, and what she truly wants
These sections showcase Hoen’s sharp satirical eye, particularly in her portrayal of wellness culture through Gemma and her company Actualize (tagline: “What would your best self do?”). The send-up of commodified spirituality and self-optimization culture feels both timely and pointed. However, some readers may find the oracle subplot strains credibility, particularly as it escalates toward its climax. The novel asks us to accept quite a bit, and while the emotional truths remain resonant, the logistics occasionally feel contrived.
The Architecture of Grief
Where Before I Forget truly excels is in its portrayal of complicated grief—not just for the dead, but for lost versions of ourselves and relationships that can never be restored. Cricket’s journey isn’t about finding closure so much as learning to live with permanent incompleteness.
Hoen structures the narrative through alternating timelines, weaving Cricket’s present caregiving duties with flashbacks to that fateful summer when she fell in love with Seth. These sections, told with the heightened intensity of teenage emotion, provide necessary context while allowing Hoen to explore how trauma calcifies into identity. Cricket has spent a decade defining herself by what she lost rather than what remains, and watching her slowly dismantle that architecture of guilt forms the novel’s emotional core.
The prose here adapts accordingly—crisp and matter-of-fact in present-day sections, more lush and urgent in the flashbacks. It’s a subtle but effective technique that mirrors Cricket’s own relationship to memory.
Characters Who Complicate
The supporting cast enriches the narrative considerably:
- Carl: The taciturn neighbor who becomes Cricket’s unexpected mentor, offering hard-won wisdom from his own caregiving experience
- Paula: The exuberant dance instructor whose nephew Max provides Cricket’s tentative entry into new romance
- Nina: Cricket’s overachieving sister, whose practical approach to their father’s care creates necessary friction
- Max: The arborist love interest who represents Cricket’s tentative steps toward a future untethered from past trauma
These relationships feel earned rather than convenient, each serving to illuminate different facets of Cricket’s character. The romance with Max, in particular, unfolds with restraint—Hoen resists the temptation to make romantic love the solution to Cricket’s existential malaise, instead positioning it as one thread among many in her gradual reweaving.
Where the Novel Falters
Despite its considerable strengths, Before I Forget isn’t without weaknesses. The pacing sags in the middle section as Cricket establishes the oracle practice—what begins as whimsical ritual starts to feel repetitive as visitor after visitor arrives for prophecies. While Hoen uses these encounters to explore different forms of grief and seeking, the structure becomes somewhat formulaic.
Additionally, the novel’s climax involving Gemma’s wellness resort plans and the reappearance of Greg Seavey (Seth’s cousin and Cricket’s teenage tormentor) feels overly convenient. The coincidences pile up in ways that strain the novel’s otherwise grounded emotional realism. It’s as if Hoen felt compelled to manufacture external conflict when the internal journey already provided sufficient dramatic tension.
The ending, while emotionally satisfying, also wraps up rather quickly. After spending over three hundred pages in Cricket’s meandering present, the resolution of both Arthur’s decline and Cricket’s professional future feels somewhat rushed. Readers invested in the character may wish for more time with these hard-won transformations.
The Verdict: A Flawed but Moving Portrait
Before I Forget succeeds most profoundly as a character study—a portrait of a young woman learning to forgive herself and embrace uncertainty. Hoen writes with empathy about Alzheimer’s, resisting both sentimentality and despair. Instead, she asks: what if dementia isn’t only about loss? What if it can also be about transformation, revelation, even magic?
This isn’t to romanticize a devastating disease. Arthur’s decline is portrayed honestly, including the frustration, indignity, and sorrow it brings. But Hoen also insists on Arthur’s continued personhood and the unexpected gifts that emerge from their transformed relationship. It’s a delicate balance she mostly maintains.
The novel will resonate particularly with readers who have experienced caregiving, grief from preventable tragedy, or the paralyzing effect of survivor’s guilt. It’s also a love letter to the Adirondacks and to the idea that place holds memory in ways we can’t always articulate but always feel.
For Readers Who Loved…
If Before I Forget spoke to you, consider these similarly themed works:
- “Still Alice” by Lisa Genova – For another intimate portrayal of Alzheimer’s from multiple perspectives
- “The Measure” by Nikki Erlick – For magical realism exploring fate, choice, and how we live with uncertainty
- “The Light We Lost” by Jill Santopolo – For romantic grief and the persistence of first love
- “The Heart’s Invisible Furies” by John Boyne – For intergenerational storytelling about identity and belonging
- “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin – For complex relationships and the question of what makes a meaningful life
Final Thoughts
Before I Forget establishes Tory Henwood Hoen as a novelist willing to take risks and explore emotionally complex terrain. While not every element succeeds equally, the novel’s heart—its insistence that we are always “between selves,” always growing, always capable of transformation—resonates deeply. Cricket’s journey from paralyzed guilt to tentative hope, from bitter rootlessness to chosen rootedness, feels earned and true.
This is a novel about the courage required to return to the places that haunt us, to care for parents who no longer remember us, and to forgive ourselves for being imperfect humans in an imperfect world. It’s about learning that the path forward often requires going back, and that sometimes the most profound prophecies are the ones we already know but haven’t yet allowed ourselves to believe.
In the end, perhaps that’s what every good oracle does: shows us what we’ve known all along but needed permission to accept. Hoen’s second novel provides that permission generously, imperfectly, and with considerable grace.
