Tuesday, June 5, 2018

The Book of M - Review

Idgie Says:
This is an interesting blend of Apocalyptic events and Fantasy, ala Stephen King.  

The world is changing and no one knows why.  First your shadow disappears, and then so does your memory.  But as that is happening, your fears can become real.  Your neighborhood turns into a nightmare of your fears, but then your neighbor's fears change it even more.  This continues until everyone's fears are running around loose and no one remembers anything.  People walk into fire because they don't remember it's dangerous.  They starve in their homes because they can't remember that a fridge has food in it.  

This is the story of the few hardy survivors left 2 years after this "plague" starts, and their tenacious attempt to remain human and alive. The characters are fully fleshed out and easy to connect with.  A good, fast read.


The Book of M
A Novel
Peng Shepherd

9780062669605 | 0062669605
William Morrow (HarperCollins)
Hardcover
June 5, 2018
Fiction / Literary
$26.99 USD, $33.50 CAD
496 pages

One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.

Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.

Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.

As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.
Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down.