Thank you for sending me a copy of The Forgetting Time - I love reading and rarely find time any more and this was a reason for me to make time 
I enjoyed the story, and found myself looking forward to reaching for the book again in quiet moments. The pace of the story was good, and although I wouldn't normally choose stories about children now (find them too emotive since I had my own), I'm really glad I was sent this one.
It is a story primarily about people and how they cope in the face of adversity, and from the start of the book, I couldn't warm to Janie, the mother of Noah and one of the main characters.
I'm not sure why this was.
Perhaps it was because I disapproved of her decision to sleep with a married man on a whim from the get-go or because she feels a bit cold and someone I wouldn't want to be 'friends' with in real life.
I could, however, empathise with her enormously when she was experiencing the harrowing difficulties with Noah.
Janie's anguish and feelings of desperation and not knowing what to do for the best for Noah, were emotions any mother could understand and were very well written.
Noah, like Janie, left me with mixed emotions. He is an enigma - troubled and difficult but vulnerable at the same time. I felt very sad for him, for much of the book, and this doesn't really leave much space to warm to him. To contrast, Cole in The Sixth Sense was a similarly troubled and disturbed character, but I really liked him. The difference is the presence of Tommy. We don't really know Noah, as he doesn't really know himself. He is so intertwined with the confused, searching personality of Tommy, that Noah isn't a 'proper' person in his own right...yet.
I felt Anderson was a character I could relate to more easily - his ability to separate himself from the emotion of these past life situations, to observe forensically to get the job done was realistic and yet he was still a character who did care underneath it all and you wanted him to. You could feel the intense sadness and frustration that losing his language caused him, and it made me contemplate how awful Aphasia is, and how we take language and reading for granted.
Anderson's interactions with Janie and Noah were well written, and realistic. Anderson's deteriorating condition and confidence were palpable, and Janie's wavering conviction to follow Anderson's lead, always leading back to her lack of options.
Denise was a beautifully written character. She is a complex, broken yet strong woman, and you could absolutely see how she had come to the point in her life at which we find her. She has lived through ever mother's worst nightmare, and whilst you yearn for Noah's situation to be resolved, you wish that Janie's answers will not come at the expense of Denise's last remaining hope.
Henry is not a particularly well defined character for me, but I think this allows us to focus on Denise and her personal struggle.
Charlie on the other hand is a character I did feel for, the one left behind - living his own life under the shadow of the horrible uncertainty that blights all their lives. His apology to Tommy/Noah in the den is heartbreaking, and you can imagine how a child in his circumstances would carry that guilt (so unnecessarily).
Pauly is another character you can't like, but you can feel some empathy for, being a child himself when the awful situation unfolds. There is some attempt at mitigation for his behaviour - his unhappy home life, but ultimately his decision to do nothing when he realises Tommy is alive, and his silence for so many years, is a cruelty that is difficult to fathom as an adult but maybe more understandable from a scared child's perspective.
The cases studies of past lives are slightly superfluous to the story, and as a sceptic about everything remotely mystical, it is interesting to me that almost all of them seem to take place in regions that have a greater number of believers in reincarnation.
As a work of fiction, I enjoyed the story and felt it was plausible and flowed well, however I am yet to be convinced that past lives are anything other than just that...a work of fiction.