Please join us on Tuesday, January 27, 2026, when we discuss The Sweetness of Forgetting by Kristin Harmel.

 

At thirty-six, Hope McKenna-Smith is no stranger to bad news. She lost her mother to cancer, her husband left her, 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 is drifting away in 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 WWII Paris. Armed with a scrawled list of names, Hope heads to France to uncover a seventy-year-old mystery.

 

What follows is “an immersive and evocative tale of generations struggling to survive” (Publishers Weekly) as Hope pieces together her grandmother’s past bit by bit and realizes the astonishing will of her grandmother to endure 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.

 

For your advance planning, our book for Tuesday, Febuary 24 is Hostage by Eli Sharabi, one of the hostages taken on October 7th.