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.