The Memory Thief

by Lauren Mansy

[sa090]

I haven't written my thoughts in a while so I feel somewhat rusty, in short the memory thief doesn't really offer anything new to the YA world.

I will be lying if I said that the book didn't have anything interesting in it, it did, the world and how memories are in it for instance could have been an amazing thing to read about if we spent more time focusing on that. However, the book being a standalone was the main reason of its downfall, because there is a lot to get done without a huge page count for it to get done.

We have to understand the world, Etta's past, her mother's situation, the memories and how it works in this world, what do the shadows have to do with any of this and maybe learn a few things more to care about the characters to name a few. For a book that was below 400 pages, that's a tall order and it shows. Etta for example is the type of YA protagonist who needs a long time for me to care about, or better yet, needs a long time to prove her worth to me. She doesn't in this book because every time she does something of worth, other things she does have to come and ruin it. The romance was typically thirsty of YA and I gagged a few times, it was not needed and the book would have proceeded without issues if it was strictly platonic. But it's YA so God forbid that's a thing.

It's not just the romance, Etta is a hotheaded emotional idiot. She doesn't stay quiet to assess the next course of action without first exploding and doing something that might make the needed course of action impossible to achieve. Even when things FINALLY started coming together for the finale, she continues being a dumbass because the person who can solve everything for her behaved cautiously toward her love interest and acted upon it. Given the position of the person we're asking for help, they are 10000% correct in what they did, but would she at the very least shut up and listen to the whole story and not act on a whim? No, because the love interest she knew for a max of 3 days, could be dead while she listens. If the above wasn't evident, Etta was easily the weakest and most annoying part of this book.

That being said, I did enjoy somethings in the book. Etta was unfortunately the protagonist so it was harder than I hoped, but the writing was very easy to go through and the world or rather the system in it was just so interesting with the small snippets I got to see of it. I wanted to see a lot more in that regard, but page constraints were a thing.

Again, I don't think that this book brings anything new, not even the whole memory thing seems all that unique despite still being interesting. However, I do honestly believe that if Ms. Lauren Mansy focused on lesser things in the book, this would have at the very least, been more than just an okay read.