TW: suicide, described brutal motor accident, death by fire, mentioned domestic abuse, mentioned child rape & murder
4.2

It began 8 months ago, a disease inflicting people with two sets of memories- one real, one not, though both feel as if they've been lived through. An NYC cop is on the scene for a suicide, a woman who does not want to live in a world she swears her child has been deleted from. She's not the first to kill herself due to not being able to deal with the memories, but it's her death that sends that cop, Barry Sutton, onto a path that will change everything. A path begun years ago- life times ago, really. He will stumble into the truth... False Memory Syndrome is not at all what the world believes.

This book grabs you from the very first page. Nothing about this book is filler, it begins and ends with a challenge. I was invested from the very beginning, and honestly, all these days later I still feel invested. It pulls you in and forces you onto the ride.

And it's a twisty ride! Made up of layers of timelines and back and forth point of views, you're never entirely sure what is possible or where things are leading. This book feels so perfectly speculative and exploratory, it's really a whole experience, almost like watching someone perform an impressive trick in front of you. You don't try to poke holes, you're transfixed, hoping something magical happens- and it does.

Part of what makes the whole thing so interesting and new, is the concept of "dead memories" and the refusal to play into a classic paradox. The inability to get out from under cause and effect makes everything feel that much more important and precarious. It also made it easier to keep track of, while also feeling almost like amassing a body count.

The only thing that didn't work for me was the ending. In general I like the turn it took, but it didn't really make sense to me at the very end, and felt more like a cop out. It seemed like Barry just made the mapping of dead memories work without actually figuring out how to? After all the science and trial and error I have no idea why he'd be able to make that major leap without even more time working through that specific puzzle.

This is an engrossing and captivating speculative scifi book! I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time.