What a cute book, I really liked it! The Forgotten Girl follows best friends Iris and Daniel, two Black students who live in a North Carolina town. They are given a class project where they have to research something related to their town, and they decide to do it on local segregated cemeteries after they discover a forgotten gravesite while playing out in the snow one night. The project starts to take an eerie turn when Iris starts having dreams about a girl who was buried in one of those forgotten graves, as well as a personal one since she feels that she’s being forgotten, both by her school and by her parents.

Overall, I thought it was a fun reading experience. It was a quick read for me (someone who is most definitely not the intended age group), one that if I actually read consistently I would have had done in a day or two of starting it. I liked all the characters — I thought Iris and Daniel were both strong protagonists, and the side characters (particularly their families) had some depth to them, too. I particularly liked Vashti (Iris’ younger sister) and Suga (Daniel’s grandmother).

The themes themselves were pretty interesting, too, and I think they were interwoven with the story well for the intended audience. I liked the exploration of Iris’ feelings of being forgotten, both with her school/step team and within her own family as her parents seem to pay more attention to her little sister than to her. Daniel’s progression throughout the story was also nice to watch, too, as the reader explores his feelings towards his father’s death.

Though, there were a few things that had me going “...huh?”. They mostly surrounded Daniel and his development throughout the story. His conundrum at the end, during what I think was supposed to be the climax (but didn’t really feel like it?), seemed pretty abrupt to me. I won’t give anything away, but it’s like he changed his mind within a few paragraphs for something that...doesn’t really make sense for him to change within such a short amount of time. Also to do with him: what happened to his relationship with basketball at the end? Throughout the story, the reader is reminded multiple times that he used to love basketball, that his friends were trying to get him back into it after his father passed away. Maybe I missed it, but it didn’t seem like it was wrapped up all that well, considering his development near the end of the book.

However, I still thought the story itself was a good one, and I particularly enjoyed learning about segregated cemeteries — I’m sure there are a lot of kids who read this that will either connect with one of the themes that the main characters struggle with, or will at least learn a thing or two about segregation outside of what they may normally be taught in school.