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A review by lilibetbombshell
Remember Me by Estelle Laure
2.0
There has been an influx of YA novels in the past nine months or so that deal with the subject of memory loss by both organic and inorganic means and memories being tampered with, and had this book been able to throw something new to the mix (instead of relying on parallelism as a crutch for world-building and plot development) it might have had a good amount of potential.
But there’s the rub: It might have had a good amount of potential… if there weren’t also other distinct issues wrong with the book.
For instance: The blurb essentially gives away every single bit of the first half of the book without reticence. Also, it took until about 45 pages into a 269 page book (so, about 17% of the way through) to come even close to clearly introducing the conflict. As I once discussed with an author and creative writing professor: If it takes you more than about 30 pages into a book for readers to get a solid idea of the world you’ve built and to introduce the central conflict, then your book already has issues.
Think of it this way: A page of dialogue in a script takes up about one minute of screen time. A movie (just like almost every story since the plays of Ancient Greece) has three acts; and in a 2 hour movie, those acts end at the 30 minute mark, the 60 minute mark, and the 90 minute mark. By that 30 minute mark, you need to have established your world, introduced all your main characters, introduced the antagonist, and solidified the central conflict of the plot.
And yes, books are a different animal, but by 30 pages into this book I had no solid grip on the world the author had built, had no solid idea of who the main character was as a person, had no clue who or what the antagonist was, and had only a vague idea of what the central conflict was save that it sounded like the same central conflict as many other books in this genre.
Then, we have the second half of the book, which changes gears almost entirely from the first half and is rife with flashbacks. This narrative shift doesn’t come across as a genuine effort at trying something new–it feels like the author didn’t know what to do with all the exposition necessary for the book to end up making sense, so it all ended up in a second half full of telling us how the first half got to where it is. I didn’t like it.
Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Wednesday Book for allowing me early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. As per personal policy, this review will not appear on any bookseller or social media site.
But there’s the rub: It might have had a good amount of potential… if there weren’t also other distinct issues wrong with the book.
For instance: The blurb essentially gives away every single bit of the first half of the book without reticence. Also, it took until about 45 pages into a 269 page book (so, about 17% of the way through) to come even close to clearly introducing the conflict. As I once discussed with an author and creative writing professor: If it takes you more than about 30 pages into a book for readers to get a solid idea of the world you’ve built and to introduce the central conflict, then your book already has issues.
Think of it this way: A page of dialogue in a script takes up about one minute of screen time. A movie (just like almost every story since the plays of Ancient Greece) has three acts; and in a 2 hour movie, those acts end at the 30 minute mark, the 60 minute mark, and the 90 minute mark. By that 30 minute mark, you need to have established your world, introduced all your main characters, introduced the antagonist, and solidified the central conflict of the plot.
And yes, books are a different animal, but by 30 pages into this book I had no solid grip on the world the author had built, had no solid idea of who the main character was as a person, had no clue who or what the antagonist was, and had only a vague idea of what the central conflict was save that it sounded like the same central conflict as many other books in this genre.
Then, we have the second half of the book, which changes gears almost entirely from the first half and is rife with flashbacks. This narrative shift doesn’t come across as a genuine effort at trying something new–it feels like the author didn’t know what to do with all the exposition necessary for the book to end up making sense, so it all ended up in a second half full of telling us how the first half got to where it is. I didn’t like it.
Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Wednesday Book for allowing me early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. As per personal policy, this review will not appear on any bookseller or social media site.