Rememberers
by C Edward Baldwin
My Rating ** (2 of 5 stars)
***I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review***
Kallie has been experiencing sensations of deja vu. Fearing that she may have a brain tumor, she is at first relieved when Dr. Frost asks her to participate in a Deja Vu / Memory study her class is doing, and after undergoing an MRI session she is told that she has epilepsy. The more she considers this, however, the more convinced she is that it isn’t true. She doesn’t just seem to remember things, she actually sees them happening a few moments before they actually do. Once her talent is discovered, Kallie is visited by a Catholic priest who tells her that she is a “rememberer”, and that she has a talent that needs to be developed so that she can do great things. Kallie not only has to develop her new-found abilities, but she also has to decide who she can trust.
I was excited to read this one based on the synopsis, but I really had a hard time getting into it. Especially near the beginning, there was a lot of jumping back and forth between different sets of characters and different locales. This was a little confusing, since even the characters you were becoming familiar with weren’t always in an expected location when you went back to them. I also felt that Kallie acted immature even for a college student, and her interactions with her new boyfriend Seth were somewhat strange. All of these things made it difficult for me to stick with and finish this one. Overall, the writing style just did not keep me engaged, or motivate me to finish the book. I think the last straw for me was when Seth incorrectly quoted John 3:16, and his father, a reverend, acknowledged the verse, not noticing that he said “for God so saved the world” instead of “for God so loved the world”. If you’re going to quote such a widely-recognized Bible verse, it’s important to get it right.
The main idea, that time is circular rather than linear, and that there are those who can remember past life cycles, was promising at first. At some point though, the story changed it’s focus to demons on Earth and it went from something resembling YA fiction to something much more vulgar. I managed to skim through the last 25% or so of the book just to see what happened, but was very disappointed. The demons appear with very little fanfare for such an important event, and the fight scenes with them are glossed over so that there is little or no buildup of tension. I didn’t really care what happened to the main characters; I just wanted it to end. As much as I dislike giving a book a really bad review (I’ve tried NaNoWriMo twice, I understand that it is VERY hard work to complete a novel, and scary to put your work out there for others to see), I just can’t recommend this book.
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