All is Not Forgotten by Wendy Walker

Rating: 1/5

An experimental medical procedure allows Jenny, a high school girl in an affluent small town, to forget her violent assault. It becomes swiftly apparent that “forgetting” is ineffective as the memories are not fully missing and her rapist remains at large. To recover what she can Jenny teams up with the town psychiatrist to locate her memories.

This books deals with rape with unconscionable, sweeping judgements from the author. It is over-described sensationally. Troubling lines like “I could not see the rape in her eyes” are casually used by the narrator, the psychiatrist, who is wildly unreliable. He is not the only one who encounters traumatic events with insensitivity and excess so I can only assume the authorial intention was not to present us with the unprofessional, unrelatable, sociopathic psychiatrist as a talking point. In a world where issues of rape culture and assault are forefronted in the media I can make no allowances for the alarming portrayal of trauma in this book.