The Forgetting by Sharon Cameron

[MerryLove]

Nadia and her family live in a communist-like community. The government gives every family their rations, and different households provide different skills from their trade for the people. The difference is that every 12 years, the entire community loses their memories. Each person carries a book attached to them, so that they can write down their personal truths to read after a forgetting. This ability to wake up without anyone remembering the past seems to be a power too great for many to resist. Nadia learns at a young age that for some reason, she doesn't forget like everyone else. With that peculiar trait, she unfortunately knows and remembers a lot of the choices people made before the last forgetting. She begins to wonder if maybe there is something she can do the help the plight of her people.

There are many wonderful characters to get to know in this novel. One of the things I loved about this book is all of the gray areas where a person's character is involved. For most of the book, there isn't a clear line between “cruel” or “good” characters. Because we hear the story from Nadia's perspective, the reader knows some past histories and decisions from characters that those characters don't even know themselves.

The council, the neighbors, and even Nadia's own family all contain characters that start out seeming like strictly cruel or good characters, but most of those lines become a lot murkier as new information is learned out them throughout the story. I love to talk about my feelings toward certain characters, but I feel like my opinion changed a lot over the course of the book, and discovering that information myself over the course of the book was one of the most enjoyable parts! I don't want to take that away from someone else. I will, however, talk about my feelings toward the two main characters at least.

Nadia is the underdog hero of the story, but she's certainly no Katniss. She ventures outside of the wall of her city, but more out of a need to escape her town and her family than a need to scavenge. She has the ability to do something that no one else can, but she doesn't start with a martyr gesture to try and save others. She doesn't tell a soul. She keeps to herself and does her best to keep anyone from finding out. She loves her family, but she still has her own personal needs to look after. She felt real to me. She made decisions and choices that I felt a normal teenager in her situation might make. She may not have been completely self-sacrificing or a glowing of example of perfection, but that didn't make her any less of an admirable and loveable character.

Gray is very similar. The reader gets to know him as Nadia does, so I found myself surprised later as some of his misconceptions turned out to be not the whole truth. He quickly become a loyal character I trusted next to Nadia's side. I don't think I could have asked for a better male co-part for her.

As a whole, I loved how thought provoking this book was for me. It got me thinking about the flaws of their societal system and where they might have gone wrong. It got me wondering about the ways that the society did seem to work, and why maybe it worked out okay in a smaller community like setting than it would in real life on a larger scale. It also got me thinking about the implications of forgetting and the choices it allows. Do the benefits of being able to forget elements of the past outweigh the consequences of those who take that power too far and abuse it? Could there ever be a degree or a situation in which forgetting might be a good thing? The whole book had me pondering new things I hadn't thought about, and I loved thinking about them myself as I discovered how things were panning out in the dystopian world.

While the story path kept me entranced the whole way through the book and the conclusion felt like it came to a satisfying close, I felt that many of those questions left me a little let down by the ending. I wanted to know more about how exactly things were going to work now, and how they would be different from the previous system.

I was also a little disturbed by the lack of any consequences. By the end, I felt like all of the questionable characters were given “good reason” for their choices or forgiven any past transgressions. The book even made a point about the town “starting fresh”, but this seemed a bit too “group hug!” and not enough justice. I left the end with a message that felt like: “All people are mostly good, and it's okay to make mistakes. Now it's all better, and we're all going to be happy forever!” It was almost the complete opposite state of emotion than all the rest of the book. It didn't take away any of my enjoyment of the book, but it did leave me with a solid “hmm” at the end.

There were so many things I loved about this book, and I've mentioned many of them above, and there was really only one other thing besides the ending that left me a little perturbed. There is a rather cliché scene in the middle that left me rolling my eyes. It turns out Boy was keeping a secret from Girl, and it changes everything. All those mushy feelings have to fly out the window to be replaced by hurt and betrayal. And now you must never speak to him again. Luckily, the author seems to realize that this type of scene is way overdone, and gets through it very quickly. I found myself very relieved at its brevity.

Rating

Overall, this book earns a 4 out of 4. It was an incredible, thought provoking book, even with a few flaws. It also earned a higher place on my shelves by being a standalone dystopian novel instead of trilogy. Sometimes a girl just doesn't want to wait 2+ years to get the end of story. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys dystopian novels!