Sunday, September 08, 2019

2019/100: The Memory Game -- Sharon Sant

I should go somewhere, but I can’t seem to leave my corpse alone. [p. 3]

David is fifteen when he's killed in a hit-and-run accident. By the beginning of The Memory Game, he's a ghost, and he doesn't understand anything.

Only one person can see him, and she's the least popular girl at school. (The girl he has a crush on, Ingrid, seems to be starting a relationship with David's best friend.)

David is not initially a very likeable character. He had a terrible argument with his mother the evening before he died, and he's been as much of a bully to Beth, the girl who can see him, as any of his peers. But gradually it becomes apparent that things were far from perfect in his life; and they're far from perfect in Beth's, too.

Some interesting small-town dynamics here, not least the medium who can't (won't?) see David, but soothes her clients with platitudes about their dear departed; the bigotry and rumour that fuel the town; the older kids who everyone knows are up to no good; the tendency to look the other way, to avoid getting involved, even when it's a matter of life and death.

I wasn't satisfied by the ending of this novel: it seemed that the whole 'purpose' of David's life-after-death was also the cause of something that wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been a ghost.

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