The Sweetness of Forgetting

By: Kristin Harmel

Narrated by: Kim McKean

At 36, Hope McKenna-Smith is no stranger to bad news. She lost her mother to cancer, her husband left her for a 22-year-old, and her bank account is nearly depleted. Her own dreams of becoming a lawyer long gone, she’s running a failing family bakery on Cape Cod and raising a troubled preteen.

Now, Hope’s beloved French-born grandmother Mamie, who wowed the Cape with her fabulous pastries for more than 50 years, is drifting away into a haze of Alzheimer’s. But in a rare moment of clarity, Mamie realizes that unless she tells Hope about the past, the secrets she has held on to for so many years will soon be lost forever. Tantalizingly, she reveals mysterious snippets of a tragic history in Paris. And then, arming her with a scrawled list of names, she sends Hope to France to uncover a 70-year-old mystery.

Hope’s emotional journey takes her through the bakeries of Paris and three religious traditions, all guided by Mamie’s fairy tales and the sweet tastes of home. As Hope pieces together her family’s history, she finds horrific Holocaust stories mixed with powerful testimonies of her family’s will to survive in a world gone mad. And to reunite two lovers torn apart by terror, all she’ll need is a dash of courage, and the belief that God exists everywhere, even in cake....

©2012 Kristin Harmel (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

great story

Good book and a good lesson of the holocaust and France and muslims help with the Jews

A beautiful story, but the narration was lacking

I started listening and stopped because I literally could not endure the narration. Fortunately, I glanced back at the reviews and saw several who solved the difficult narrator issues simply by increasing the speed of listening! 1.3x seemed to be the perfect speed and I was then able to enjoy this beautiful story.

Loved it

Very well written and hard to put down. Relevant for today and a great love story.

Story was ok…narrator can’t do accents

This story lacked for me because of the narrator’s often sing song voice that lacked emotion, French accent that sounded Asian an a 93 year old man sounding like a 30 year old.
A readers ability to change from male to female old to young is hard but helps the listener “see” them. This presentation did not do that.

Terrible narration.

The story is beautiful. It is wonderfully written. The narrator was terrible. Her voice will grate on your nerves. Although she uses some inflection, mainly she just reads the words. Her accented voices are better. She so annoyed me I would have stopped listening to the book if the story had not been so beautiful. This is one audiobook that is best read.

Excellent story - reader sounded whiny

I love Kristen Harmel as an author and have read countless books by her. The story of The Sweetness of Forgetting was excellently written however, the person reading the story was an absolute struggle and took a bit to push through. She was whiny sounding and it just grated after a while so I find I had to stop more often due to the annoyance. Excellent story but beware of the nails down a chalk board reading at times.

Great story

Poor narration- very flat reader when listening on audible but very good heartfelt story about family, traditions, bakery, and WW2

A Woven Tale

Highly enjoyable, great mix of characters and a carefully laid out story that held the attention of heart and mind.

Great story

Terrible narrator. There was no inflection and accents needed were horribly spoken. Ms Harmel’s story deserves better. Very interesting story and some nice twists, although most were expected. I really enjoyed listening.

Beautiful Story

I love Kristin Harmel’s writing and her female main characters who grow, no matter the age.

I wasn’t thrilled with the narrator when she tried to do foreign accents. They were inconsistent and incorrect e,g. a British accent for a French person? Otherwise Narrator did a nice job with the American accent, capturing the characters of Hope and Annie very well.