The Sweetness of Forgetting

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Hope is the protagonist and one of the two point-of-view characters in the novel. She is a slim white woman with shoulder-length dark brown hair and sea-green eyes flecked with gold. When the novel opens, she is 36 and newly divorced from her husband, Rob, who is an attorney. Hope initially feels frustrated about being back in Cape Cod as a single mother because, when she was younger, she wanted to be a lawyer herself and see more of the world. However, in her first year of law school, while dating Rob, she got pregnant and they married. Hope gave up school and stayed at home with Annie. She doesn’t regret that decision, nor the decision to move back to Cape Cod to be near her mother, Josephine, while Josephine battled breast cancer. With her marriage at an end and her mother dead, Hope feels stuck in a life she didn’t imagine for herself, living in her mother’s cottage and running the North Star Bakery, begun by her grandmother, Rose. She begins the story feeling little of the quality that her name invokes. This establishes the conflict at the beginning of the novel, and the novel follows Hope’s character development toward finding love and feeling connected to her life at the bakery.