Title: Remember Me
Author: Estelle Laure
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Publication date: March 22nd, 2022
272 pages
3/5 stars
Goodreads Synopsis
A new young adult novel from the critically acclaimed author of This Raging Light and Mayhem
If you could erase all of your painful memories, would you? Blue Owens wakes up one day with the strangest feeling that something is very wrong. Everyone’s acting weird and she’s found a note in her closet telling her to get on the Little Blue Bus at 7:45, which she does, meeting up with the exact person she was supposed to avoid: Adam Mendoza. Even though she has no idea who he is, something about him is so familiar. When the two are discovered by their families, the truth is revealed—Blue has paid to have her memories removed, and Adam is one of those memories. What transpires is Blue’s journey to get her memories back, uncover the truth of why she had them removed in the first place, and ultimately decide whether they were too necessary to who she is to lose in the first place.
Review
Remember Me is a futuristic YA contemporary about how far one will go to forget, and then to remember. One day in 2032, Blue wakes up feeling… off. Her friends and family are acting weird, she’s having glitches in her memory, and she found this weird note in her room giving a date and time to meet somewhere with… someone. Blue feels sick and as she goes about her days she feels weirder and weirder, until she gets on the bus listed on the note and meets him. Again.
The main premise in this book is that you can “Release” memories of events, people, etc. It’s meant to take away pain and make life easier for hose who have suffered trauma or just need to forget something. Blue chooses to undergo the Release of her boyfriend, Adam, but then immediately wants to go and figure out what it is she felt needed to be erased. A lot of the book is flashbacks to Blue’s like 2 years ago to present to detail exactly what she had erased. I had a hard time with this book because I feel like the ordering of the timelines was really wonky. So little of the book is Blue in the “after”, the majority of it is the “before”, which feels backwards to me. It was hard to stay engaged.
I also finished with a lot of questions regarding some of the events that went on in the book that weren’t answered. I won’t list them because that would be spoiler-y but I don’t generally enjoy leaving a world with several unanswered questions. I did like the concept and memory removal in the future – it felt very Black Mirror meets YA contemporary. It brings up an important conversation on mental health, depression, grief, trauma, and how to handle loved ones in this situation. There are many trigger warnings, so please read with caution.
Thank you to Wednesday Books and Netgalley for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.
Happy reading, folks!
Baltimore Bibliophile 
I bet you had the same questions that I did. That really frustrated me that there were so many gaps. Excellent review!
LikeLiked by 1 person