Set in Fairview, Conn.--a small, affluent town complete with country club and BMW-lined streets--All Is Not Forgotten is, on its surface, about a teenager named Jenny Kramer who is brutally attacked at a local party. Following her rape, her parents opt to ease their daughter's pain by approving a controversial medical procedure designed to erase Jenny's memories of the attack. And the miracle treatment works: while Jenny is informed of the overall facts of her case, she recalls nothing of it herself.
In the months that follow, the consequences of this decision become more and more apparent to everyone. The police are left with no leads and little hope of identifying, and thereby finding, Jenny's attacker. She cannot remember the event specifically, and is left haunted by her past and unable to return to her former happy teenage self. Jenny's father, Tom, becomes obsessed with finding her attacker, while his wife, Charlotte, prefers to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary has happened.
All Is Not Forgotten offers readers a well-imagined and very human look at the lasting impact of tragedy. Its characters are flawed and all the more engaging because of it. Witnessing the ways they tell their stories to each other in the midst of all of this--and the way that Wendy Walker tells their stories to us as readers--cements Walker as an expert storyteller and All Is Not Forgotten as an excellent novel of psychological suspense. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm