a bit of a strange choice of premise & setting; no attempt is made to explain the process or mechanism of memory extraction; but that's not the point of the story: the life of a unique Mem is. once I settled with this I found myself intrigued & fascinated by her story.

the story is told non-linearly; scenes in the present of the story will suddenly shift into an account of some backstory; I found this to be a little hard to follow sometimes

some of the characters, including the protagonist, are Black, & the problems that they might encounter living in early-20th-century Canada are simply ignored; the author, who is Black herself, has an author's note explaining why she made this decision, & also recommends some literature on the (generally less discussed) history of racism in Canada, which I think will be going on my to-read list