Book Review – My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares

My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares definitely makes my must-read list of 2010!  I can’t believe how much I loved it, especially since it is unlike anything I’ve ever read before!  I’d read it a second time if I didn’t have another 50 or so books sitting around my house, begging to get read.  My Name Is Memory is one of those rare books that you know will be hugely successful, get made into a movie, and the author will be sitting around chatting with Oprah and Ellen about it in the not-so-distant future.  People will be recommending this book to each other for years.  Don’t be surprised when your book club picks it next year, just remember I told you they would!

Ann Brashares is already wildly successful as the writer of the young adult series The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.  (Which I read and enjoyed, as well as the film versions.)  But after this book, Ms. Brashares is going to become a superstar.  Really, the book is that great, in my humble book blogger and lifelong reader opinion.  Not only did this book just get published, and fans are already making tribute videos on YouTube, but the book has been optioned for the big screen over six months ago.  So I hope this tells you I’m not the only person who thinks the book is brilliant.

 

How cool is it that a book that’s been out for less than three weeks already has a fan trailer?  I had to include it to give them some love.  Watch out Stephanie Meyer and Twilight stars, there’s going to be a new trilogy in town!  My only sadness surrounding this novel is the fact that I didn’t read it before it came out (Darn you family and friends, volunteer work, BookExpo America, Book Blogging Convention, ADHD, The Real Housewives of New York and New Jersey, as well as my daily two to five hours job searches that steal my time – but since I JUST GOT A JOB, I hope you’ll understand!) so I can’t offer it to you as part of a book giveaway.  My heart breaks knowing I have failed you by not being able to give some lucky person a free copy of it.  Perhaps some kind soul who has the power will read this review and allow me to give you this book, because YOU NEED to read it.

As I mentioned before, this book is unlike any other novel I’ve ever read, and in this case, that’s a good thing, because I like to keep my book reading horizons wide open.  If you forced a gun to my head and demanded I classify this book into a certain genre, I’d have to tell you it was part romance, part historical fiction, part fantasy, part semi-paranormal romance, part Y.A., part adult fiction, and I’d even say this book was a little time travel-esque, even though it isn’t about time travel in the normal sense.  If you’ve read The Time Traveler’s Wife, you’d understand what I mean.  Looking at that list, perhaps your first instinct would be to run from this book, because it sounds too different.  But trust me, you’re only going to want to run straight to it.

My Name Is Memory is the first of a planned trilogy of books that begins as a high school romance-from-afar between teens Daniel and Lucy.  Once they finally speak at the prom, away from everyone else, Daniel makes a startling move, and kisses Lucy, even though he is trying his hardest not to overwhelm her.  Lucy “meant to stay in his kiss until she died if necessary, but felt something strange, a stranger sensation barreling toward her, a heavy foreboding.  She was able to ignore it for a while, until it crashed into her all at once.  It was a sensation of feeling and remembering at the same time, two explosions colliding and expanding.  It was like deja vu but far more intense.”  When she asks “who are you?” he tells Lucy, or Sophia, as he keeps calling her, that he loves her, that he always has always loved her.  He senses that she remembers him, as their souls have been reincarnated over a thousand years, but they keep losing each other throughout time.  While Daniel remembers the details of his previous lives, Lucy, as with most people, can not.  Except this time she does, but just in that moment of their kiss.  She runs away before Daniel can explain everything to her, such as how Daniel has spent his entire life attempting to connect with her romantically by seeking her out in each life.  The rest of the book goes back and forth between the present and future, along with the memories of the night they first met, and the lives they have managed to connect on some level.

My Name Is Memory is a bold attempt to go where no other modern-day fiction novel (that I’ve read) has went before – by using great writing to sell you on a belief that directly contradicts what most people don’t want to believe in – reincarnation.  Ms. Brashears doesn’t throw in hunky werewolves or brooding vampires to trick you into reading it, she simply writes about the one thing all people desperately want - love.  Ann writes about love as a necessity, a compulsion, an absolute must.  Daniel must find Sophia not to save the world or mankind, but because he must find her to experience love the way it should be experiences.  Call my a closet romantic (because I am one) but I love a story like this.  This book works because it required me to take a leap of faith and believe that romance isn’t dead, and that all of our hearts (and souls) can go on and on and on, if we allow them too.  Or, we can at least believe it could be possible.  In adult novels, writing about love that begins during our formative teen years this beautifully is a hard thing to accomplish, and only Nicholas Sparks comes to mind with The Notebook.  As a woman pushing 40, married with step-children and broken down by the poverty, abuse and neglect during my dysfunctional childhood, my terrifying experiences during my teen years, in addition to my multiple health issues (all due to a genetic disease that 96% of people choose to abort their baby), I NEEDED to read a book that would allow me to believe in love like this again.  I think back to every book I read as a teen and every book that affected me this powerfully with the struggle to find love -Tiger Eyes, Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre, and even The Thorn Birds.  I’ll never forget those books, because I carry the memory of reading them with the hope they gave me that I’d be able to be just like the characters I read about – what they overcame, and how those characters managed to fall in love with the person they were destined to love.

Perhaps the fact that I’ve actually been hypnotized and had a past life regression in my early twenties (You can read my post about it here) has allowed me to believe in, embrace, even surrender myself to the story of Daniel and Sophia.  My Name Is Memory takes place beginning in 552 A.D. Asia Minor to 1918 England to 1972 Virginia, and it is a beautiful story of two souls who have tried to connect and experience love at the right place, during the right time.  Just when you think they finally get to experience love in modern times, something happens (that I can’t share, darn it!) and they have to face up to what stands in the way of them experiencing love in the present  Just think of what you’ve experienced in your own life to have found love, experience love, keep live, or get over love that has been lost.  Daniel and Lucy go through what we go through, in addition to what they go through, but at least Daniel has the knowledge to comfort him that he can try again in the next life.  Wouldn’t that be a huge comfort if we lost a love, like a husband, or child or parent, knowing we’d see them again in the next life?  Here is how Ann Brashares explains reincarnation in her novel.

“Well. It’s a strange thing,” I explained. “With each birth your body starts out fresh and mostly blank, but then you print yourself on it over time. You hold onto old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too.” I glanced up at Sophia. “And you hold them in your joints and your organs and wear them on your skin.”

“You do.” She was giving me that same look of indulgence, but it was less confident.

“We all do.”

“Because we live again and again?”

“Most of us.”

“Not all of us?” Her indulgence showed more signs of genuinely wanting to know.

“Some live only once. Some a very few times. And some just go on and on and on.”

“Why?”

I put my head back on my pillow. “That is hard to explain. I’m not sure I really know.”

“And you?”

“I’ve lived many times.”

“And you remember them?”

“Yes. That’s where I’m different than most people.”

If you have to buy one book this summer, please, let it be this book!  To purchase your copy of My Name Is Memory, click here.

To visit Ann Brashares website, go here.

To follow Ann on Twitter, click here.

Find Ann on Facebook here.

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