This. Fucking. Book.
Where do I even start? The believable, relatable characters? The phenomenal descriptions from beginning to end? The total twist at the end that I did not see coming?
Nah… Let’s start instead with the subject matter of the book.
I feel like rape stories are done time and time again, but I haven’t even seen one from the point of view of someone not directly involved in the act. This story is told through the daughter of the accused, who allegedly raped her best friend. WAIT it gets worse. The dad allegedly raped his daughter’s best friend, who happens to be underage. WAIT WAIT! The act allegedly happened while the daughter was in the same room, sleeping.
What. The. Fuck.
The daughter, Katie, has to go through the next six years of her life without her father. She is fiercely loyal to him, and grows up hating her best friend, Lulu, for ruining her family’s life. She cuts contact completely, not only because the lawyers tell her to do so, but also because she wants nothing to do with her anymore. Katie was in the same room, for godsake. She would have known if something was going down that shouldn’t have been. Besides, her father loved those girls. He accepted Lulu as one of his own. He was a well-respected man of the community. There’s no way in hell that Lulu’s allegations could be true.
Right?
The closer it comes to her father’s release date, the more unsure she becomes of what exactly happened that night. Had there been a fight between herself and Lulu? Did Lulu have motivation to get Katie’s father a one way ticket to the jailhouse?
There’s a blank spot in her memory (some forgotten hours, ROLL CREDITS) but when she goes back to the cabin they spent those summers at to get it ready for her father’s return, she finds a box of letters and receipts that offers answers if only she is brave enough to follow the trail.
Did her dad do it?
Did Lulu lie?
I’m not here to spoil that for you. Read this book. It’s not one I would normally pick up, but it was a freebie on Amazon one month (yey prime!) and I’m glad I chose it.
The Forgotten Hours delves into a subject matter that is uncomfortable but necessary. There’s the #MeToo movement happening (wow girl welcome to the party like fifty years later seriously), and I first want to say that I stand behind it completely. Consent is an important thing to give and receive before any sort of bumping of the uglies commences. With more and more people coming out and saying that they’ve been harmed in one way or another by another person, it can be hard to trust in someone. And I’m not saying that it’s just for women, either. For men, too, it can be hard to trust. And I feel like this is because the whole concept of “consent” is a tricky subject.
Now, backtrack a little bit. When I say that, I don’t mean blatant rape. Like, violence against a person is bad. Date raping a person is bad. If someone says “No, don’t touch me,” that is obviously rape. If someone is passed out and you choose to feel them up, that is bad. There’s things that are obvious.
You still with me here?
So, consent. It’s tricky. It’s tricky because both people are supposed to be mind readers. In the case of Lulu and Katie’s father (NO SPOILERS okay some spoilers), there is no violence. There is no “No, don’t touch me.” There is the thing of being underage and statutory and all that shiz, but that’s a different subject. Let’s take that out of the picture entirely. Let’s pretend she’s eighteen for the sake of my point.
Okay, we pretending? Sweet.
If Katie’s father and Lulu sleep together, and Lulu didn’t really want to, but she didn’t say anything otherwise, is it rape? Or did they consent? I don’t know, because what is considered consent varies from person to person.
Which is why it’s important that people talk about it.
Where do we draw the line? Katie wasn’t completely sure. Lulu wasn’t entirely certain. Katie’s father, well, he goes to jail over it, so you can draw your own conclusions on what he thinks.
One final point I want to make is about character. As I said before, Katie’s father is a well-respected member of the community. He’s involved in his family. He is a friendly, outgoing man. He’s always ready to welcome people with open arms. He likes people and people like him. He’s always ready to turn any bad situation into a new opportunity. He has all these good qualities, and so his friends and neighbors can’t believe that he is capable of doing something as terrible as what he’s accused of.
What people forget is that every person (both in real life and in good fiction) has multiple qualities that make them who they are. Very rarely is there a human being who is all good or all bad. Katrin Schumann, the author of the book, made it a point to tell all the good about Katie’s father all the way through, and that’s important. People who are considered saints by all that know them are still capable of doing horrible things. People who are labeled as criminals can still help those in need. There are no monsters in this world.
I’ll say it again:
People are not monsters.
People you don’t like are not just like Hitler, and Hitler was not a monster. He was a man. A man who committed atrocious acts and convinced a country to dispose of an entire group of people for reasons I cannot pretend to understand, but he also did a handful of good, too. In no way does that excuse what he did. But at the end of the day, he was a man. Not a monster. I feel like society is quick to label people monsters because they don’t want to accept that anyone is capable of doing bad things, but at the end of the day, at the end of right and wrong, we are all capable of anything. And that’s scary.
Annddd somehow I went from a book review to the fundamentals of labeling. I think that’s a good place to stop.
Tl;dr Read The Forgotten Hours.
Manda Kay Writes 