This week's novel is The Forgetting by Sharon Cameron. This one was a page turner. I was so absorbed in this that I didn't notice my son scribbling on the windows in crayon until there was purple on three different panes of glass.
Every twelve years in the city of Canaan the Forgetting takes place. Everyone loses their memories and has to rely on books that they keep with them at all times, where they've written the truth of what happened to them and who they are, who their family is, where they live, and what their professions are. Nadia is the only person who did not forget at the last Forgetting. She knows how much people have lied to change their lives after the big reset. For instance, her father isn't dead as it says in her family's books, but rather changed his identity to marry someone else and start a new family. She knows that people go crazy right before the Forgetting, believing they can get away with anything. She knows that no matter how much she loves her mother and sisters and anyone else, they will forget her, so she holds herself at a distance. With the next Forgetting on its way, Nadia starts to uncover the truth of Canaan, desperate to find a way to protect her family.
It was a very well balanced mystery, where I figured things out at the same speed as Nadia. I'm one of those people who usually figures out the twist on page twelve and then has to sit through the characters being slow, so this was refreshing and enjoyable. It kept my interest by introducing several mysteries, some only related to each other, interconnected once I had every piece of the puzzle, some on the grand scale of the city as a whole and some more personal mysteries of why individual people acted the way they did. All of these mysteries were answered in satisfying ways that fit together, fit with the world building, and fit with the characters' motivations. The world building influenced the characters and the history, characterization influenced the characters' actions. It all fit together beautifully.
And the characters were interesting and engaging. One of Nadia's sisters doesn't like her and can be downright cruel in significant ways. But instead of her being a two dimensional bitch, it comes out that she thinks that Nadia wasn't their sister before the last Forgetting, she doesn't belong there and she's a liar. She thinks that Nadia's behavior is hurting their mother (which is arguably true). She wants to protect her family, and she is willing to work with Nadia to achieve that goal.You understand where she's coming from and that she is her own person with her own sympathetic agenda. And the book is full of these flushed out side characters, turning each characters' motivation into its own mystery that gets answered in "ah ha" moments.
It also kept my interest by never letting up on the conflicts. As soon as one fire was put out (once literally), Nadia would have to run to the next crisis without time to revel in minor victories. Every time one mystery was solved, it would reveal two more or her family would have a crisis. I heard recently that thrillers follow a format of "yes, but..." and "no, and..." meaning that our hero succeeds in deactivating the bomb, BUT in deactivating it they alerted the terrorist to their presence and made the situation worse. Or, the hero doesn't succeed, the bomb goes off, AND NOW half a building is missing and our hero has blown out his hearing. This story does this really well, keeping the story clipping along and maintaining tension.
The other notable thing about this story is how it transitioned seamlessly from a second world fantasy where they live in a city surrounded by walls with limited technology, where one sun rising and setting lasts 150 "days" and everyone forgets everything every twelve years and carries around books to hold their memories. That sounds like a fantasy setting to me. But as Nadia investigates, she uncovers technology that's familiar to the reader, and she finds evidence that this civilization is set far in our future. The boundaries between fantasy and sci-fi are ambiguous and arguable, but I found it really cool how this book slipped from the tropes and stylings of one to the tropes and stylings of the other. It worked because the world as you understood it at the beginning made sense as a partial view of the world as you understood it at the end. This story felt built from the ground up, with an understanding of the wider world, history, and conspiracy, and presented the world at the beginning as a product of that, rather than the sci-fi portions tacked on as a separate entity.
It was a lot of fun.
***
Next week: The Rithmatist, YA with chalk drawing, geometry magic by Brandon Sanderson.
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