BookPage Teen Top Pick, September 2016
Set in the fictional land of Canaan, The Forgetting follows one young woman’s journey to discover why all her neighbors forget who they are every 12 years—and how all their hard truths can be so easily bent.
In Canaan, if you don’t write down your memories in your book, you’re destined to forget them and lose all sense of identity. Nadia was just a toddler for her first Forgetting—when her father scratched himself out of her family’s books and abandoned them all. But Nadia knows what he did. While everyone else loses all memories after each Forgetting, Nadia secretly remembers everything, and she’s the only one who’s trying to make sense of their shared truth.
The next Forgetting is looming just weeks away, and Nadia has grown careless in her race against the clock to learn how to stop it. Gray, the glassblower’s son, catches her breaking the law as she hops the high walls of Canaan, and he demands to see the other side as well. As the two explore the world outside the walls together, their friendship morphs into a romance. But their true love may soon become fiction if they can’t solve the mysteries of Canaan before the next Forgetting.
The Forgetting is Sharon Cameron’s fourth young adult novel, and she’s grown adept at blurring the lines between fantasy, dystopian and science-fiction genres. Cameron reminds us, through Nadia’s documented memories, that we must learn to appreciate the truth as much as question it, exploring the morality tucked within the fallacy of memory.
Justin Barisich is a freelancer, satirist, poet and performer living in Atlanta. More of his writing can be found at littlewritingman.com.
This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
