Review: ‘Never Forgotten’ by Stacey Nash

Continuing on from Forget Me Not and Remember Me, this is the thrilling third novel in Stacey Nash’s unforgettable series.

Since the strike on Collective territory during Anamae’s rescue, things have taken a turn for the worse. Unprovoked attacks on innocent people have Anamae and her friends fighting day and night to minimize the damage. With hundreds of lives lost, morale amongst the resistance fighters has plummeted. But that’s the least of her worries.

Manvyke still has Anamae’s mom, Annie, secreted away somewhere and after the way they parted, Anamae worries it’s not at her mother’s bidding. Maybe Annie’s disappearance all those years ago wasn’t her choice. But with Manvyke scouring the world, there’s something far more pressing than the need to find Anamae’s mother …

It’s a fight against time to find the other keys before Manvyke. In his hands, the three relics could unlock enough power to reek a much worse havoc than the current issues at hand. If the councillor gets his hands on those keys, civilization will bow down.

THE RACE IS ON.

This book is the third of four in the young adult modern world/sci-fi Collective series, and gives us more details of the world and the hunt for the founders’ keys. If you haven’t read the first two books (Forget Me Not and Remember Me), I recommend that you go back and do so; this isn’t the sort of series that you can jump into partway through.

I loved the little glimpses of foreign locations as Jax hunts for the second of the three powerful relics, trying to get there before Manvyke and his batshit crazy son, Nik, can. Mae, in the meantime, is trying to figure out what Manvyke has done with her mother, working on the assumption that she’s a prisoner … or worse. Mae’s group also runs afoul of Nik at various points.

I keep mentioning Nik, because he was definitely the villain of the piece. Manvyke is largely off camera, whereas Nik appears frequently to taunt Jax, leer at Mae, and beat the snot out of all and sundry.

A lot of the story focuses on Mae’s dilemma in choosing between Jax and Will. I’m not usually a love triangle kind of person, so I admit this particular sub-plot slowed things down for me a little. Still, the angsty bits are interwoven with other events, which were enough to keep me reading.

As far as the love triangle dilemma itself goes, it was obvious from the start of the series (not just this book) that Mae loved Jax. I didn’t really understand why she chose to torture herself about the whole thing, except that Will is her best friend and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings by rejecting him out of hand, I suppose?

Out of the two boys I actually prefer Will — Jax is a little bit too angry and broken for me (and what’s with him actually believing a word that comes out of Nik’s mouth? I know they are brothers, but sheesh!). But by about halfway through I was cheering for Jax and Mae to get together just so they could both stop angsting all over everything. 😉

My favourite character is still Lilly, the sweet and sad friend of Mae’s who is determined to be an active part of the resistance despite her overprotective father.

Never Forgotten does a good job as a “middle book” in that it transitions us from the discovery stories in the first two books to the set-up for the finale in book four. The pace is zippy, there is a respectable amount of kissing, and the touch of sci-fi tech is still my favourite part about this world.