The Forget-Me-Not Library by Heather Webber

The Forget-Me-Not Library by Heather Webber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!
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Juliet Nightingale is lucky to be alive. Months after a freak accident involving lightning, she’s fully recovered but is left feeling that something is missing from her life. Something big. Impulsively, she decides to take a solo summer road trip, hoping that the journey will lead her down a path that will help her discover exactly what it is that she’s searching for.

Newly single mom Tallulah Byrd Mayfield is hanging by a thread after her neat, tidy world was completely undone when her husband decided that their marriage was over. In the aftermath of the breakup, she and her two daughters move in with her eighty-year-old grandfather. Tallulah starts a new job at the Forget-Me-Not Library, where old, treasured memories can be found within the books—and where Lu must learn to adapt to the many changes thrown her way.

When a road detour leads Juliet to Forget-Me-Not, Alabama, and straight into Tallulah’s life, the two women soon discover there’s magic in between the pages of where you’ve been and where you still need to go. And that happiness, even when lost, can always be found again.
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I am of the opinion that nobody writes magical realism as well as Heather Webber. In fact, until I read Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe, which had been loaned to my mom by a friend of hers, I wasn't even really aware that was a genre of literature. However, now I have come to love it, and specifically Webber's brand of it, so much that I eagerly await her new offering each year. I know that I have to set aside a full day to read it because I likely won't be able to put it down. And this year, today was that day. I am happy to report that this book did not disappoint.

Within the first few pages, I knew that this town and these characters were going to be special. Within the first pages, we are introduced to the mischievous young reader Katy (I would hazard a guess that many of us will see ourselves in her), our protagonist Juliet (the person who needs that special Heather Webber magic), and a whole town full of the sorts of people that help create the kind of found family that has become Webber's specialty. With a library at the center of the action, some romance at the outskirts, and a redemption arc that left me reaching for a tissue, I couldn't rate this anything less than five stars.

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