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REMEMBER by Eileen Cook

REMEMBER

by Eileen Cook

Pub Date: Feb. 24th, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1696-2
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster

After suffering a major loss, one girl utilizes her father’s new memory-erasing technology to ease the pain only to spiral down a rabbit hole of shocking family secrets.

Harper has it all: a devoted boyfriend, a prizewinning horse and a rich father who’s created Memtex, a medical treatment that “softens” traumatic memories. But when a sudden loss rocks her perfect world, she finds herself unable to get past it. She asks her father for the Memtex treatment, but he forbids it with an eerie adamancy. Harper enlists Josh, her boyfriend and an intern at her father’s company, to help her get the treatment she thinks she needs. And though the pain vanishes just as promised, a dark new puzzle presents itself to Harper in its place, and the truth hidden within it turns everything she knows on its head. Cook populates Harper’s charmed life with a few dynamic characters, like her sharp best friend, Win, and her Memtex protestor–turned–alternative love interest, Neil. However, Harper reads as self-involved as her suspicious father does, leaving little room for readers to root for her. Much time is spent arguing over her relationship with Josh, though she isn’t keen on him from the beginning. The pace crawls until the ending arrives in a rush.

A rehash of the memory-loss trope weighed down by too little action and an unengaging protagonist. (Science fiction. 14-18)