Waiting On Wednesday

Memento Nora ~ Angie Smibert

There's a new book coming out next spring that's really caught my attention. Memento Nora by Angie Smibert is about a world where people simply take pills to forget about traumatic events. Here's the synopsis from Goodreads:

Nora, the popular girl and happy consumer, witnesses a horrific bombing on a shopping trip with her mother. In Nora’s near-future world, terrorism is so commonplace that she can pop one little white pill to forget and go on like nothing ever happened. However, when Nora makes her first trip to a Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic, she learns what her mother, a frequent forgetter, has been frequently forgetting. Nora secretly spits out the pill and holds on to her memories. The memory of the bombing as well as her mother’s secret and her budding awareness of the world outside her little clique make it increasingly difficult for Nora to cope. She turns to two new friends, each with their own reasons to remember, and together they share their experiences with their classmates through an underground comic. They soon learn, though, they can’t get away with remembering.

Over the past several years it's sort of been around that certain drugs could maybe be given to erase (or lessen) painful or traumatic memories. I never exactly thought that was a great idea--I know that painful memories are obviously going to cause pain (and that's a dumbed down explanation) but it seems like this isn't one of those times where ignorance is bliss . . . having a gap or just not being aware that something that had happened to you had happened would be strange to me.


So, anyhow, I'm really interested in this book and what it could potentially be. It sounds really great and like it maybe comments on society while still being fun. Besides, how many other times do you get to read a book with somewhere called the Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic? Probably never.

It's out April 1, 2011 from Marshall Cavendish in hardcover

Amazon page & author website