Author: Cat Patrick
Publisher: Egmont
Rating: WORTHY!
This novel is about London Lane (kewl name!), a mid-teens woman who cannot remember a thing about her past (her memory blanks at 4:33am each day, and yes, there's a good reason for that), but she can see events from the future and actually retain those memories. If that isn't intriguing enough to make a person read a novel, I don't know what is! It certainly pulled me on board, and the really good writing kept me there and buzzed me effortlessly through the entire novel. I absolutely love novels like this one and treasure them because they're so rare.
The good news: no prologue. The bad news: first person PoV. Bad news ameliorating news: in this case, I tolerated 1PoV really well because of the quality of the writing. The point-of-view actually fits the story to begin with, and it was so well done that it was neither onerous nor stupid. Even the rather tropish guy (Luke Henry) is acceptable, and there's also a best friend who is, as usual, vying with the main character for my deepest affection. Her name is Jamie Connor. So Cat Patrick manages to get away with including more than her fair share of YA tropes in the novel, yet not a single one of them is like iron nails on a chalk-board to me because of how understated this is and how well it's put together. I'd advise any aspiring writer to read this story to imbibe the sheer skill of its construction. Yes, this is me, YA trope hater, saying this story went there, and got away with it, and I loved that Cat Patrick got away with it.
London's life is beset with hassles because of her condition, and not only the memory thing, but also her condition of being in her mid-teens in high school with all the issues that typically entails even for every-day run-of-the-mill students. There's the difficulty she endures with Jamie, there's the question of why Luke is a blank in her future. There's the creepy question of the nonsensical funeral which London starts remembering, and there's the unnerving secret of what exactly happened in the parking lot of the supermarket that day when she was traveling with her dad - a dad who is no longer in her life. Can the hard-won and comfortable bits of London's life survive a huge disagreement with her best friend who refuses to listen when London tells her she knows how this will turn out? Can it survive an breech of trust with Luke? Can it survive both? Can London, even a little bit, change the future she remembers so accurately? And just what secrets has London's mom been keeping?
London's biggest problem (to begin with) is that even though she can "remember" the future, Luke isn't in it. How can this be? It's a puzzle to her. I suspected many things of Luke at that point (that he might be a past-forgetter, future rememberer like London, that he might be a bad guy, and so on), but I'm not going to tell you how right or wrong I was in any of that speculation! And yes, on the down side, there were some issues I had with the story, but these paled to insignificance, as the saying goes, in the brilliant glare of the consistently high standard set by the writing in this novel
Patrick did an amazing job of portraying London's struggle, and the tricks she uses to get through her oddball days. Her descriptions of London's daily travails at school are a pure joy to read. But the story doesn't end there (nor did it begin there!). There is mystery to unravel, and Patrick includes just enough of that supernatural element to give the story zest, but not anywhere near so much that it lards the story up with the unnecessary or the distracting. Patrick is all about story, and this novel is a tour-de-force of professionalism, brilliant narration, and magnetism that sucked me in and refused to let me out until the epilogue was done.
