Hello! Happy Wednesday, today I’m going to be posting my review of Lara Avery’s novel The Memory Book.

This book, surprisingly, made me cry. It takes a lot for a book to make me cry and this one just hit right in the gut.

The Memory Book by: Lara Avery: Sammie is just your average teenager; she’s got lofty goals to win her debate Nationals, make it to NYU and become a lawyer, the only thing standing in her way, a rare disease called Niemann-Pick Type C. This means that her body is slowly deteriorating and her memory is fading, and fast, that’s where her memory book is born, to help her remember. What a heart wrenching novel. The plot was good; it was fast-paced and it wasn’t full of scientific terms, it was just enough to get the reader by and to understand the depth of Sammie’s illness. The way this was written, in the form of a diary, was personal which let the reader connect to the characters. Learning about all the secondary characters through, essentially a word document, was interesting, a little one sided, but we get to see how important all of them were to Sammie, which made it really special. This novel focuses a lot on the love triangle that brews between Sammie, her childhood friend and her long-time crush, and it’s kind of annoying. Yes, the way everything played out led to characters transforming, but the triangle just felt so out of place. That was one thing that was truly bothersome about this novel; for the most part everything else was really well done. The characters were well rounded and dimensional forces that really connected with the reader. Seeing all the characters change throughout the course of this novel was beautiful and the life lessons they learned were well worth reading. The ending was very reflective, and sad. It was a really nice way to end the novel, a graceful send-off.