Book Review #2: Unremembered

The book being reviewed today is part of the Unremembered Trilogy. It is book one of the series which is entitled Unremembered. To give a bit of background the author, Jessica Brody, has written several other books including the Karma Club, 52 Reasons to Hate My Father, and Love Undercover. This books seems to mainly surround the young adult science fiction genre. Here’s a brief summary of the book:

amazon.com

“When Freedom Airlines flight 121 went down over the Pacific Ocean, no one ever expected to find survivors. Which is why the sixteen-year-old girl discovered floating among the wreckage—alive—is making headlines across the globe.

Even more strange is that her body is miraculously unharmed and she has no memories of boarding the plane. She has no memories of her life before the crash. She has no memories period. No one knows how she survived. No one knows why she wasn’t on the passenger manifest. And no one can explain why her DNA and fingerprints can’t be found in a single database in the world.

Crippled by a world she doesn’t know, plagued by abilities she doesn’t understand, and haunted by a looming threat she can’t remember, Seraphina struggles to piece together her forgotten past and discover who she really is. But with every clue only comes more questions. And she’s running out of time to answer them.

Her only hope is a strangely alluring boy who claims to know her from before the crash. Who claims they were in love. But can she really trust him? And will he be able to protect her from the people who have been making her forget?” (Provided by Jessica Brody’s website)

In my opinion, the book was enjoyable. I’ve had a lot more time to read since school got out for me a few weeks ago and this was a nice book to read. First and foremost, the cover on this is amazing. The person in the background makes me think it is Seraphine due to the description of her eyes and hair while the blurriness also relates to her amnesia since her memories are blurred.

Besides the amazing cover, the main theme in this book seems to be amnesia. The main character, known as Violet/Seraphine, loses her memory and is looking for hints of memories to help her regain her full memory and why she was even on the flight. Another theme discovered further in the book, without giving away spoilers, is genetic engineering. Without giving too much away, this is an important theme in the book since it does relate to Seraphine’s disappearance and herself as a person.

Personally, I always enjoy a book more when there’s a bit of science in a young adult book. It makes the plot much more realistic and interesting as well while giving some type of background for one of the characters. One thing I thought was a bit much was throwing in different themes. Further along in the book, something similar to the idea of time travel is brought up and it seemed a bit much along with the main idea of amnesia. Something else in the book that I enjoyed was just having the title of sequence in the beginning of the book.

Many authors have stopped doing this and I liked having the chapters and their titles in the beginning so I have something to look forward to. Although I haven’t experienced memory loss to the extent of amnesia, I can imagine how terrible it must be to meet people who recognize and share memories with you only for you to feel nothing towards them and feel terrible as well.

This book was published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux Books for Young Readers (an imprint of Macmillan) in 2013. The common price for a hardcover edition of this is $11.46. The ISBN number is 978-0374379919.