Listen.
All the world forgets me. First my face, then my voice, then the consequences of my deeds.
So listen. Remember me.
My name is Hope Arden, and you won’t know who I am. We’ve met before – a thousand times. But I am the girl the world forgets.
It started when I was sixteen years old. A slow declining, an isolation, one piece at a time.
A father forgetting to drive me to school. A mother setting the table for three, not four. A teacher who forgets to chase my missing homework. A friend who looks straight through me and sees a stranger.
No matter what I do, the words I say, the people I hurt, the crimes I commit – you will never remember who I am.
That makes my life tricky. But it also makes me dangerous . . .
The Sudden Appearance of Hope is the tale of the girl no one remembers. But this gripping story – of love and loss, of hope and despair, of living in the moment and dying to leave a mark – is novel that will stay with you for ever.
From this I was expecting a very different story to the one we got; not bad, but it took me a while to adjust to what was happening.
Hope Arden is our narrator. We’re told that moments after meeting her, people forget her. This started when she was in school, and I got the impression some considerable time had elapsed since then, though this is never explicitly said.
Having realised that many of the things we take for granted are not an option for someone who is forgotten the moment they walk out of a room, Hope turns to criminal activity to survive. We meet her during a fairly audacious theft, and it’s clear that this time she has tangled with the wrong people.
Hope’s story is intertwined with what sounds like a very plausible, though terrifying, app called Perfection. This in itself could have made for a fascinating book, but it is intertwined cleverly with Hope’s story.
Throughout the novel I felt myself fascinated by the character of Hope and her relationships with some of the people that she meets time and time again. Though it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, this was an entertaining read.
Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital copy in exchange for an honest review.