Say You’ll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez

Genre: Romance, literary fiction 

One POV, Adult 

Isabella’s Rating: ★★

Say You’ll Remember Me follows Samantha who is moving across the country to take care of her mother who has dementia. She meets Xavier, who runs a veterinary clinic, after she visits the vet clinic to get a check up on the stray cat she found. They go on a date that they both think is the best date they’ve ever gone on, but it ends sour when Xavier finds out she is moving. 

This book is a standalone at the moment, but the author is planning on adding more to make it an interconnected standalone series. This book is told from both Samantha’s POV and Xaviers, as are all of Abby Jimenez’s books. 

This is Abby Jimenez’s worst book out of all the ones I have read. While the story did have certain plot points that made it worth reading, every character either felt flat or just insufferable. It was also very instalove, and did not feel realistic for what was going on. This book just overall felt rushed and lower quality than her other books. 

Abby Jimenez is no stranger to having quirky jokes and characters, but this one felt a lot more insufferable than her others. Xavier was referred to as Rhysand (A character from A Court of Thorns and Roses) about 10 different times throughout the book. First of all, Rhysand is not a real person, he is fiction. There is no possible way that 7 different characters in this book read the exact same book, and all pictured Rhysand as Xavier in this story. It was unrealistic and annoying. Right after Samantha goes to the vet clinic, Xavier walks out of his office, and asks her on a date. While he’s at work, right after he treats her cat. There was no tension, or even hint that he was going to do that. Xavier is written to be closed off and grumpy, but the first pretty girl he sees, he asks her out? It was so jarring and strange in the context of the characterization and story. 

One thing that Abby Jimenez does extremely well in her books is writing about struggles and problems, but being able to bring light to it and create a beautiful person and story who grows and adapts to the circumstances. This book had none of that. The problem that arose when Samantha and Xavier were dealing with long distance led nowhere. Xavier just ended up doing all the work and adapting to the change himself. HE would fly to her, HE moved closer to her, HE uprooted his life to be by her, HE over-worked himself to be able to see Samantha. There was no compromise or communication within the relationship that made me like Samantha whatsoever. There were so many different aspects of this story that just made no sense for the characters or relationships that Abby had built. If there were just the problems I mentioned I would have been able to tolerate the book much more than I did, but the continuous cycle of relationship drama and family drama made this book insufferable. 

One thing that I think made this book tolerable to a point where I could finish it was the story of Samantha’s family battling her mother’s depression. Some of the quotes that Abby wove in perfectly with the story was so beautiful. Without relating directly to the story of knowing someone with dementia, I don’t think the story would have hit as hard as it did. The commentary of wanting someone that will be a longtime watcher of your life was so eye opening. I think that without a direct relation to someone with dementia, you don’t realise how much of a struggle it is seeing someone you knew still be alive, but not really with you anymore. Another big topic that this book discusses is the idea of missing out on little things within a relationship when it is long distance. I think that those quotes were beautiful, but it was brought up at a time when I was already over it. I think that if I read another book that deals with this topic I would have loved it so much. Reading the quotes from this book and frankly any Abby Jimenez book, is so much fun, but the message she was trying to get across got lost in the bad plot. 

Overall I would not recommend this book, but I would recommend other books by Abby Jimenez, she has a lot of good books that deal with a variety of different topics and mental health issues. I would also like to see more books become popular that deal with more niche problems that you wouldn’t normally read about.