Remember Me Gone. Stacy Stokes. 2022. 368 pages. [Source: Library]
First sentence: People come from everywhere to forget.
Premise/plot: Remember Me Gone is a mystery (of sorts) set in Tumble Tree, Texas. Lucy Miller, our heroine, is excited to join the family business. Her father has a unique gift--he can remove people's unwanted memories. Sadness. Grief. Pain. Suffering. Regret. (etc.) Those visiting Memory House are encouraged to remove all physical traces of those connected with the memories they are having erased. Otherwise, 'echoes' might lead to confusion and disorientation. Most of those who arrive at Memory House, however, are new patients (if you will). Lucy, only sixteen, hasn't yet learned how to remove memories. But she's eager to try...
But as 99.99% of readers can predict, all is not as it seems with her father, the Memory House, and the town of Tumble Tree itself. Lucy's own memories have been altered. She has quite a mystery on her hands to solve...
My thoughts: I felt this was an almost all the way through. It was a good solid almost. I think the premise is interesting enough to have potential. I am curious in the world Stokes has created. I'm more curious about how the Memory House came to be. How did her family discover they have this talent? How did they come to settle in Tumble Tree? Is there something special about this one location? Why not set up a Memory House in a more populated place? What is the state of the world? Has something catastrophic unsettled society at large? The glimpses of the wider world we see--very few and far between--things don't seem to be particularly well. I'm curious if there could be post-apocalyptic undertones going on. Or if I was just in a weird mood when I set down with this one. But most of the questions I have about this world are not answered. And perhaps rightly so.
The focus of the story is on Lucy's "coming of age" and how she discovers that HER personal memories have been erased--perhaps dozens of times--and how knowing that her father has manipulated her--and that she is not alone in this experience. There are powers that be at work in this town that are harming everyone. It is more than personal.
The premise, as I mentioned, is interesting. I just found the storytelling to be "almost" instead of fully engaging. I didn't really connect with the characters. This could be just my personal reaction (obviously). But for me it was so premise-driven that it lost any character-driven angles it might have had.
© 2022 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews
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