You Will Forget This Book

A Rant About the new Abby Jimenez Novel and Modern Slang vs. Timeless Reading

Disclaimer: I’m not a diehard romance reader. I have phases where I just want to chill with a light rom-com, and I like romances that have a little something more going on besides the love story, but they’re not my favorite kind of book by any stretch of the imagination. So this rant might be meaningless to you if you’re easily pleased by romance novels.

Abby Jimenez’s latest novel Say You’ll Remember Me is about a meet-cute that turns into a long-distance relationship, with lots of family drama thrown in. Some of Abby Jimenez’s books have really worked for me in the past. She’s great at funny dialogue and I appreciate that she gives her characters problems that feel real and she doesn’t shy away from showing the effects of those problems on the love story’s development. It did feel slightly disconcerting to read in this latest novel about the dementia of a woman my age, who was the character’s mother. I know people can face dementia in their fifties, and she was presented as reaching this condition early, but the lack of romances with protagonists in their forties and fifties was in sharp relief here. I found myself more interested in the love story between the protagonist’s parents and how her father was dealing with this slow, painful loss of his beloved wife than I was in the almost-thirty couple who were just sad for 300 pages because they were in a long-distance relationship.

There was plenty to enjoy in the book, but let’s get to the real problem. This book is full of nonsensical TikTok language. Characters say something “hits different” or is “mid,” the “would you love me if I were a worm” concept makes an appearance, and there’s entirely too much talk of Rhysand from ACOTAR. Nothing dates a book like of-the-times slang, and in five to ten years someone will pick this book up and not understand a word these characters say. Perhaps the problem is that I’m a middle school teacher and my brain can’t handle hearing more of this slang, but it feels a bit deeper than that.

When an author does this, it feels desperate. Abby Jimenez writes great humorous dialogue and she can tell a good story. I would argue that there wasn’t much of a love story here, because the characters fell for each other immediately and spent the whole book ignoring an obvious solution. I could forgive that, however, if the dialogue hadn’t felt like Jimenez was trying too hard to appeal to the book influencer crowd. I don’t know if that was her goal, but she just went from an autobuy author to an auto-avoid for me, and this book helped to clarify that I need all of my reading to feel a bit more timeless, regardless of the genre.