After a devastating and humiliating breakup with her boyfriend, Delphine "Del" Lockwood retreats to Bar Harbor, Maine, and her family's historic cliffside manor. As her beloved grandmother is ensconced in a nearby assisted living facility, slowly succumbing to the ravages of dementia, Del believes she can help her mother with Mimi's care while coming up with a new plan for her future.
Miriam "Mimi" Gardner Caravasios has lived almost her entire life on an island across from Bar Harbor, living in the house built by her grandfather for his bride. Initially a summer retreat for the wealthy family from New York, they eventually came to settle in year-round, and this is where Miriam met the love of her life, Theo Caravasios, a local fisherman. Three children and a lifetime later, she's returning to the Whispers for what may be her and her grown children's final Christmas together as she physically and mentally declines, retreating more and more into the past.
As Del's aunt and uncles gather at the old house, Mimi is made comfortable on the first floor of the old house in the former housekeeper's quarters. Adam, a favorite from the care facility, is hired to live in as a private duty caregiver for the holiday. But in the face of Miriam's decline, the three Caravasios siblings inevitably begin to chip away at the thin veneer of their cordial relationships with each other and attempt to gain favor in their mother's eyes. Del knows it's all about the money, but when strange, unaccountable things happen, and Mimi talks about a visitor in the night, she begins to fear someone is trying to hurry their inheritance along.
YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS by Kat Rosenfield is an outstanding dark and brooding gothic thriller. With its dual timeline, one narrated by the grandmother, Miriam, and the other by the granddaughter, Delphine, I was swept away to the Bar Harbor estate known as the Whispers, of both the past and the present.
While the Miriam of the past recounts her life clearly and without filters, her present existence is told through the eyes of her loving granddaughter, Delphine, with added memories from her children, Del's mother, aunt, and uncle. She's failing both physically and mentally, living more and more in the past of her memories. As the grand matriarch of the Caravasios family, this leaves her children vying for the last shreds of her lucidity and, hopefully, a big payout when she passes away. Miriam's stories of the man who visits her at night were disturbing and sent chills down my spine.
Delphine is a sympathetic heroine; life has momentarily handed her the short end of the stick. Her clandestine relationship with Adam was sweet and exciting until the events at the Whispers began to give her reasons to doubt him. Aunt Diana is a brittle, desperate woman, and Uncle Richard an alcoholic, and Del looks at them both as possible suspects in Mimi's death when a close examination of the circumstances feels suspicious.
With a plotline anchored in events of the past finding purchase in the present with plenty of twists and turns along the path to where they finally converge, I recommend YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS to readers who enjoy family dramas, dual-timeline tales, secret romances, mystery, suspense, and thrills.
A Knives Out-style whodunnit with a twist of Taylor Jenkins Reid, You Must Remember This is an immersive Gothic mystery, with a long-ago love affair, icy death, and a rich family gone bad, from Kat Rosenfield, the acclaimed author of No One Will Miss Her.
On Christmas Eve, eighty-five-year-old Miriam Caravasios steps onto the ice that surrounds her seaside estate on Maine's Mount Desert Island. As a younger woman, she used to steal out on winter nights to meet her lover, walking across the frozen reach to their secret meeting place. She knows the way—but not the year. Miriam, her mind clouded by dementia, doesn’t hear the snap of thin ice until it’s too late.
Was it an accident? Suicide? Or worse: did someone lure the old woman onto the frozen reach, to her death?
There are plenty of suspects; Miriam’s fractured and complicated family has gathered in their Bar Harbor mansion to celebrate what everyone believed would likely be the matriarch’s last Christmas. The guests include Delphine, Miriam’s granddaughter, a frightened and insecure young woman who adored her grandmother, and Miriam’s live-in aide, Adam, whom Delphine has been secretly dating. There is Miriam's former housekeeper, Shelly Dyer, who left the family's employment years ago under mysterious circumstances. There are Miriam’s children: Theodora, who gave up everything to assume the role of caretaker; Diana, who seems just a little too eager to inherit her share of the estate; and Richard, whose longtime grudge against his mother has curdled into gleeful contempt at her deterioration.
But it’s Delphine who comes in for the greatest scrutiny when they learn the shocking news that Miriam’s will cut off her children, leaving her granddaughter almost everything.
As tensions rise, Delphine is emboldened to start asking questions: not just about her grandmother's death, but about her life, and the love story that defined it as the rest of her memories faded. The trail will take her into the past, into dark places — and eventually, onto thin ice.
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