Alex, the storyteller in Forget Me Not unfurls the multicolored banner that is his family history. In vivid and rich narration, from his grandfather’s bull fighting ranch in Mexico and his father’s chiropractic education in Iowa, to his own search for self and the women he cannot forget, Alejandro is both guide and lost soul.

Through three generations and across four continents, this tale of yearning, searching, loss and forgiveness grabs the reader on every level and yanks you through turmoil, depravity, tenderness and awakening. A late-night page turner, this is not a book you will soon forget.

Click here to download the first chapter (in .pdf format)

or listen to it in audio format below:

Reviews

Chiropractic? Bulls? Life, death, ghosts and all kinds of love. There is something for everyone in this marvelously narrated story. It’s perfectly delightful. Next book?”

Jane – London, England

Love that dog! The vivid narrative left me cringing in one moment, roaring with approval then crying my eyes out in the next. Unspeakable things. Betrayal. Unrequited love. I could not put it down.

Franca – Tuscany, Italy

A new world for the reader. One of the most important elements in fiction—and one not understood by so many new writers—is that a novel should give readers something to look at and wonder about, something different from their ordinary lives.

Your novel is exotic, and your characters are compelling. It is a big Dickens-like wonderful mix of elements. It’s a combination coming of age and historical novel. The characters’ personalities and backgrounds are strong and fascinating. There’s an excellent soap opera element to Forget Me Not: one darn thing after another keeps happening The reader never knows quite what’s going to happen next in Forget Me Not, which is excellent. You are a talented writer.

Jim – WA, USA

First of all, let me just say that I loved Forget Me Not, and I was not prepared to enjoy it because magic realism has never been one of my favorite genres —— with one exception: Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. Forget Me Not has the same marvelous cinematic quality as LWfC, and I found myself seeing FMN as a movie as I read.

Did you have a screenplay in mind while you were writing? I ask because your chapters organize the action in the way LWfC’s installments do, and your mini-histories pin down the timeline as do LWfC’s recipes. A long memoir like yours demands this kind of close attention to structure and you have managed it beautifully.

Joan – SF, USA

You sure can paint the picture! It should be in braille … It is a page turner with paragraphs of such poetic description that need revisiting, sometimes chapters later … The backdrop to the narrative is a visual and emotional experience. The interwoven detail of the characters is matched by the tapestry of history and events.

Wait a moment while I linger in the place and live the writing … It has introduced me to things I have never known before and places I have not seen before and left me wanting more. What do I know? I do know that you have a gift!

Kathi – CT, SA

Love, love, love the book. Couldn’t put it down.”

Deb – SC, USA

The Journey to Forget Me Not

I am still not sure how this happened. But writing Forget Me Not started in February 2013. My fingers flew over the keyboard with places and characters materializing out of thin air and cramming my brain. I hung on and went for the ride … never knowing which shore I was going to land upon. At the 50,000 word mark I sent off the skeleton – the bare bones – for a professional look over and received mixed reviews; my writing was flabby; littered with adverbs; too detailed; not detailed enough; urged to leave writing to others … Never to leave any stone un-turned I took a deep breath and looked objectively at how to turn a rough pebble into something I could be proud of. I learned that I knew nothing and gasp – there were rules to writing. I had broken just about all of them. I joined an anonymous on-line writing group and got my knuckles rapped – often. Researching was a whole new realm. A single line or phrase would be all that was used after countless–often painstaking– hours. I have been truly enriched. Having been put on the backburner for a couple of months, the characters and their stories were agitating to be heard again. The manuscript grew alarmingly and at 86,000 words went off for another pair of unbiased eyes to pick over it. There was a glimmer of hope after all. The last few months have been a period of refining, checking, re-checking and polishing each character. Getting a simple thing like a time-line straight, ‘almost done my poor dyslexic brain in’. Forgive me for those holes I’ve missed and any other anomalies that may jump out at you. I do hope you enjoy Forget Me Not’s characters and their stories as much as I had writing them. For a free text and audio download, see the links above. After, if you’d care to read and listen some more, go to the Pre-order page or go directly to Amazon’s website. If you’d like to tell me your thoughts (I’d really like that) – good or bad – please contact me using the Contact page. I promise to respond.