The Forgotten Fall - DNF Review

A Forgotten Fall (A Lord for All Seasons, # 3)

By: Nadine Millard

Expected Publication: September 16, 2022

? pages

Genre: Adult, Historical Fiction

Source: Publisher via NetGalley (Thank you!!)

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Goodreads description--All she's ever wanted is freedom, challenge, and adventure. But the longer she spends with the wounded soldier from her past the more she realizes she might just want him.

Francesca Templeworth has never met a man that didn’t somehow disappoint her. While other girls her age dreamed of love and romance and marriage, she wanted adventure and challenges and freedom.

No man has ever held her interest. No man but Adam Fairchild, who’d gone off to war and had never come back.

Adam Fairchild has spent years running from the demons he encountered on the battlefield of war, from a past that he no longer remembers, and a present reality that feels too heavy a burden to carry. Returning to Halton he hopes to find a safe haven. What he finds instead is Francesca Templeworth, a pretty girl with a sharp wit who’s turned into a beautiful woman with a smart mouth.

All Adam wants is to hide himself away, miserable in the darkness. But he didn’t count on the most stubborn woman in all of Christendom insisting on dragging him back into the light.

Francesca can’t fight her attraction to Adam any more than Adam can fight is own to her. But until he learns to let go of the past, what hope do they have of a future together?

Adam is the one man she’s never forgotten. But the question is, will he let himself fall?

Initially the description of The Forgotten Fall sounded interesting. I didn't get very far before I felt torn over the writing. On the one hand, I was curious about the family that can't seem to abide by society's rules. Yet it became clear that Cheska's inability to follow the rules of polite society would likely land her in a sexual situation. Her disdain for any kind of rule is only a recipe for her to break the ones that are convenient at the time.

Obviously Adam has been through trauma considering he went to war, was injured, and lost his brother and father before he made it home. And then he only sought to drown his sorrows in alcohol. Magically, one interaction with Francesca is enough to make him want to turn things around and start living. One addiction to another essentially.

I can't discount Adam's trauma. And I've never been one to be opposed to love helping someone through a difficult time or changing their opinions of their struggles. But I also believe that we can't live our lives completely for others and sometimes the work we have to do on ourselves is outside of others. I'm not describing this very well.

Basically, my struggle with the writing is that the characters felt like victims of their own lives and emotions. As if they had no control over anything that happened to them, any choices were made by default based upon their emotions. Perhaps the last 40% would have changed pace and the characters would have said "no" to their emotions and used their "thinking brain" (aka their frontal lobe) to make decisions. Writing from an emotional standpoint can easily suck readers into the characters, but the characters need to have a spine. They need to do more than feel.

Unfortunately, I decided to DNF The Forgotten Fall at 60%. I always wonder if the remainder of the book would have redeemed it for me, but I just do not have extra time to read something I'm not enjoying. I found myself sighing and holding my breath not because I was anxious to keep reading and find out what was going to happen next, but because I truly wanted to be doing anything other than reading this book. I know that sounds harsh. I'm sure there are readers out there that would love this book, but the characters were too much of victims for me--when they had a right to be and even when they didn't. Have you read The Forgotten Fall? What did you think? Let me know!