Before I Forget Summary: Tory Henwood Hoen’s Oracle Tale
Introduction
Christine “Cricket” Campbell is twenty-six, aimless, and standing in the mud at the end of a long dirt driveway in the Adirondacks.
Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen follows her back to Catwood Pond, the family camp she has avoided for nine years, where her older sister needs help caring for their father, Arthur, who is living with Alzheimer’s disease.
What starts as a temporary visit becomes a full-time arrangement.
As Arthur’s memory loosens its hold on everyday facts, he begins saying things that seem to arrive from somewhere else, and a quiet father-daughter experiment grows into something neither of them planned.
TL;DR: The Short Version
- Who: A stalled twenty-six-year-old woman, her declining father, and a small pond community in the Adirondacks.
- What: Cricket quits her New York wellness-company job to care for Arthur, whose dementia coincides with uncanny moments of insight.
- The turn: Those moments attract visitors, and the family camp becomes a local oracle.
- The tension: A corporate buyout offer asks Cricket to turn her father into a product.
- The core: Grief, caregiving, first love, and the idea that people are always moving between selves.
Book Snapshot
| Genre & Subgenre | Contemporary Fiction / Women’s Fiction; family drama with magical realist elements |
| Core Narrative Tropes | Return to a hometown, the unlikely oracle, the caregiver journey, unresolved past tragedy, contrasting siblings |
| Tone & Atmosphere | Introspective, warmly humorous, nostalgic, poignant; heavy with Adirondack weather and seasons |
| Primary Conflict | Cricket’s decade-old survivor’s guilt versus her need to build a future, alongside the effort to protect Arthur’s dignity from commercial use |
| Pacing Style | Character-driven and reflective, moving through one present-day year with dated flashback chapters |
| Book Structure | 54 chapters plus acknowledgments; present-day chapters interleaved with retrospective chapters (June 2015, December 2015, January 2016, 2017 and Beyond) |
| ISBN | 978-1250276797 |
| Pages | 288 |
| Publisher | St. Martin’s Press |
| Author | Tory Henwood Hoen |
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Who Is Before I Forget For?
This book suits readers of contemporary and women’s fiction who gravitate toward family drama and small-town settings.
It is built around a first-person narrator who reflects on her past while managing a present-day caregiving routine.
The narrative moves at a reflective pace, alternating a present-day year at Catwood Pond with flashback chapters set in 2015 and later. Readers who prefer fast, plot-heavy thrillers will find a slower structure here, while those who read for character interiority, seasonal atmosphere, and quiet community detail will recognize the shape of the book.
Its subject matter includes Alzheimer’s disease and dementia care, the death of a young person, survivor’s guilt, and the wellness industry.
A grounded mystical thread runs through the story, presented through Arthur’s predictions and Cricket’s divination project.
Before I Forget Summary: What Happens in the Book
Spoilers ahead. This section covers the full plot, including the ending.
Cricket Campbell arrives at Catwood Pond in early spring, her hatchback stuck in mud on the driveway. She has not been to the family camp in nine years. Her older sister Nina, who has cared for their seventy-four-year-old father Arthur since his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, is preparing to leave for a research fellowship in Stockholm.
The original plan is to tour memory-care facilities and place Arthur in a home. Cricket finds the facilities impersonal, and she decides instead to quit her administrative job at the Manhattan wellness company Actualize and move in full-time.
The novel alternates with chapters set ten years earlier. In the summer of 2015, sixteen-year-old Cricket worked as a lifeguard at nearby Lake Locust and fell in love with Seth Atwater, a seventeen-year-old tennis instructor staying with his cousin Greg Seavey.
Before leaving for the school year, Cricket ended the relationship on Nina’s advice that distance would make Seth pine for her, and she regretted it immediately.
On New Year’s Eve 2015, Cricket persuaded Arthur to drive her to Catwood Pond so she could crash a party at the Seavey camp and reconcile with Seth. She arrived to find that Greg had set Seth up with another girl, Molly.
Cricket fled on foot across the frozen pond. Seth caught up on a snowmobile and carried her to her dock, and the two agreed to talk the next day.
On his return trip across the ice, Seth struck a two-foot pressure ridge, was thrown from the machine, and died instantly.
Grief and guilt followed Cricket for a decade. Greg Seavey blamed her publicly, and Cricket screamed at Arthur on the porch, holding him responsible for driving her there that night.
Her parents divorced, and Cricket spent nine years drifting through jobs in Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, and Florida.
In the present, Cricket and Arthur settle into a daily rhythm. Arthur predicts small events accurately, mentions Seth’s name despite not recognizing Cricket as his daughter, and singles out “The Lovers” card in a tarot deck.
Cricket researches the Oracle at Delphi and proposes an October project testing thirty-one forms of divination. During a session reading shadows on the boathouse, Arthur remarks that Seth is standing on the dock.
Their neighbor Carl, a woodworker who once cared for his own mother with dementia, reveals that Arthur previously relayed a private message from Carl’s late mother. Convinced Arthur is a genuine channel, Carl and dance teacher Paula Garibaldi help formalize an experience for visitors.
Carl carves three signs along the driveway bearing Delphic maxims: KNOW THYSELF, NOTHING IN EXCESS, and CERTAINTY BRINGS TROUBLE.
Paula leads guests in a primal dancing meditation, Cricket serves an elixir of lemon, honey, basil, and Crystal Light, and Arthur holds court by the fireplace before guests take a cold plunge in the pond.
The first official guest is Cricket’s former boss, Gemma Dwyer, CEO of Actualize. Gemma writes a viral essay about her pilgrimage, and a New York Times feature turns the operation into a national sensation.
Visitors arrive from across the country, including a grieving father, a YouTube star, a retired NFL player, and a terminally ill patient named Anita. Arthur accepts donations in a wooden box, which cover household expenses and vet bills for the family’s adopted cat, Dominic.
Cricket reconnects with her childhood friend Chloe Zimmerman and begins dating Max, Paula’s nephew and a local arborist. Carl helps Cricket recognize the survivor’s guilt she has carried for a decade.
Conflict arrives when Gemma and an investor named Anthony arrive in Locust. They have partnered with Greg Seavey to buy the Seavey estate and rezone it as a commercial wellness retreat, and Anthony offers Cricket $100,000 for Arthur’s “intellectual property,” planning to digitize his likeness and voice with AI.
The money would fund Cricket’s dream of veterinary school. She refuses, recalling Actualize’s tagline and telling Gemma that her best self “wouldn’t sell out.”
Shortly afterward, Arthur suffers a transient ischemic attack. Cricket halts the oracle operation to protect his health, and Gemma’s deal collapses when the Seavey estate is sold to a private family instead.
In early autumn, Seth’s mother Jill Atwater visits Catwood Pond. She thanks Cricket for the joyful summer Seth had in 2015, shows her photographs and a checklist he wrote that included the line “introduce cricket to mom (?),” and tells her Seth held no bitterness about the breakup.
As autumn deepens, Arthur enters late-stage dementia and systemic organ failure. Cricket arranges in-home hospice care with financial help from her mother, Tish, with whom she reaches a mutual understanding.
Nina returns from Sweden with her newborn son, Anders. The sisters reconcile, and Nina acknowledges her own shortcomings while expressing awe at Cricket’s strength as a caregiver.
Arthur dies peacefully in his bed. On the morning before his funeral, Cricket performs a final act of bibliomancy, pulling an original edition of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small from the shelf.
Inside, she finds an inscription Arthur wrote for her tenth birthday: “The truth is yours to divine; the future is yours to design.” Supported by Max, her mother, and her sister, Cricket prepares to apply to veterinary school and step into her next self.
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Characters In This Book
| Character | Role |
| Christine “Cricket” Campbell | The twenty-six-year-old narrator who leaves her New York job to care for her father at Catwood Pond. |
| Arthur Campbell | Cricket and Nina’s seventy-four-year-old father, a retired civil engineer living with Alzheimer’s disease who becomes known as the Oracle at Catwood Pond. |
| Nina Campbell | Cricket’s older sister by six years, a PhD student who cared for Arthur before leaving for a fellowship in Stockholm. |
| Seth Atwater | Cricket’s first love, a seventeen-year-old tennis instructor who died in a snowmobile accident on New Year’s Eve 2015. |
| Carl | A neighbor across Catwood Pond, woodworker, and former caregiver to his late mother who becomes Cricket’s advisor. |
| Paula Garibaldi | A former dance teacher in Locust and longtime friend of Arthur who leads the primal dancing meditation for visitors. |
| Max | Paula’s nephew, an arborist living near Long Lake, who becomes Cricket’s romantic partner. |
| Gemma Dwyer | Founder and CEO of the Manhattan wellness company Actualize and Cricket’s former boss, who seeks to commercialize Arthur’s oracle persona. |
| Greg Seavey | Seth’s cousin, who blames Cricket for Seth’s death and later partners with Gemma to rezone his family’s former property. |
| Chloe Zimmerman | Cricket’s childhood best friend from Catwood Pond summers, who reconnects with her in the present. |
| Patricia “Tish” Campbell | Cricket and Nina’s mother, a corporate executive who divorced Arthur after Seth’s accident and funds his hospice care. |
| Jill Atwater | Seth’s mother and Greg’s aunt, a real estate attorney who visits Catwood Pond and gives Cricket closure. |
| Dominic | Arthur’s rescue cat, who lives in the Catwood Pond house. |
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Beneath the Surface of Catwood Pond
| Theme | How the Book Presents It |
| Memory, identity, and Alzheimer’s disease | Arthur loses facts such as his daughter’s name while predicting small events and naming Seth, and Cricket describes his decline as a spiral rather than a slope. |
| Grief and survivor’s guilt | Cricket spends nine years drifting through seasonal jobs after Seth’s death, and Carl tells her that guilt convinces people the past is about them. |
| The “between selves” transition | Cricket describes herself as stuck between selves, and the recurring motif of coughing up a heart and regenerating frames growth as non-linear. |
| Genuine connection versus commercialized wellness | Actualize sells high-priced wellness products in Manhattan, while the Catwood Pond operation runs on a wooden donation box, dancing, and conversation. |
| Caregiving and reconciliation | Cricket’s care of Arthur leads to repaired relationships with her mother, her sister, Chloe, and Jill Atwater. |
Quotes from Before I Forget
“I am stuck between selves. Right now, I am no one.”
— Narrator (Cricket Campbell)
“Everyone talks about Alzheimer’s as a decline, but that’s not quite accurate. It’s not a slope, but a spiral, like water circling a drain.”
— Narrator (Cricket Campbell)
“I want to be able to acknowledge the tragedy without reliving it. I want to be able to remember Seth without being haunted by him.”
— Narrator (Cricket Campbell)
“Guilt is conniving. It befriends your ego and tries to convince you that everything’s about you—the past, the future. But it’s just not true. The only thing we ever have is the present, and we do the best we can with it.”
— Carl
“I’ve thought long and hard about ‘What would my best self do?’ And the answer is: she wouldn’t sell out.”
— Cricket Campbell
“Not our final selves, or our best selves, or even our improved selves, but just our next selves. As I now know, we are always between selves. It doesn’t mean we are lost—it means we are growing.”
— Narrator (Cricket Campbell)
“The truth is yours to divine; the future is yours to design.”
— Arthur Campbell
Books Like Before I Forget
- The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young — Shares a rural setting, a family legacy, past trauma, and subtle mystical elements tied to place.
- Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt — A warm, poignant story about grief, aging, and unexpected community in a small town.
- Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes — Centers on a young woman stalled by grief and guilt who gradually reclaims her identity and romantic life.
- The Story of Arthur Truluv by Elizabeth Berg — Focuses on the wisdom and dignity of an older character, cross-generational friendship, and loss.
- Still Alice by Lisa Genova — Follows a family confronting Alzheimer’s disease and the changes it brings to identity and relationships.
- The Light We Lost by Jill Santopolo — Traces a first love across years and an alternating timeline, with grief and memory at its center.
Before I Forget is a 288-page contemporary novel set at Catwood Pond in the Adirondacks and in New York City, published on December 2, 2025.
