Book: The Unforgettable Guinevere St. Clair

It's hard to make up my mind whether or not I liked this story.  There were enough moments along the way that had me guessing, but I wasn't trying to predict the outcome of the story; instead, I was trying to guess what the real identity of the story was.

From Goodreads:

Guinevere St. Clair is going to be a lawyer. She was the fastest girl in New York City. She knows everything there is to know about the brain. And now that she’s living in Crow, Iowa, she wants to ride into her first day of school on a cow named Willowdale Princess Deon Dawn.

But Gwyn isn’t in Crow, Iowa, just for royal cows. Her family has moved there, where her parents grew up, in the hopes of jogging her mother Vienna’s memory. Vienna has been suffering from memory loss since Gwyn was four. She can no longer remember anything past the age of thirteen, not even that she has two young daughters. Gwyn’s father is obsessed with finding out everything he can to help his wife, but Gwyn’s focused on problems that seem a little more within her reach. Like proving that the very strange Gaysie Cutter who lives next door is behind the disappearance of her only friend, Wilbur Truesdale.

Gwyn is sure she can crack the case, but when she does she finds that not all of her investigations lead her to the places she would have expected. In fact they might just lead her to learn about the mother she’s been doing her best to forget. ​

There are some disturbing sections in the storyline.  Gwyn, who spells her name with a Gu- when spelled out properly and Gw- when abbreviated, is somewhat of an eccentric girl in spite of being critical of others.  She is pretty self-righteous, though I'm not sure that's what author Amy Makechnie intended.  In fact, I found Gwyn to be an annoying character who is far, far from empathic.  She rudely dismisses her own mother's mental health, she mistreats the old lady who watches the going-on of the neighborhood, and she rudely accuses Gaysie of being evil just because she is different.

The end will have readers screaming at Gwyn for making the weakest of choices, defying authority, resulting in a regrettably-predictable tragedy.  Like most kids, I suppose, she should have known better!