Forgotten

Patrick, C. (2011). Forgotten. New York: Little, Brown. London Lane, 16, suffers from a most unusual problem. Each morning, as she is sleeping, her brain resets at 4:33 a.m., and everything that she already knows is deleted, forcing her to relearn who her friends are, what her routines are, and what she has already worn to school earlier in the week. Her history is erased every day, and she must rebuild her memory banks. She writes notes to herself each night and then reviews them each morning in order to keep from being totally confused each day. To add to the problem, she is somehow able to see into the future and knows what is going to happen to herself and to her friends. Because she knows that her best friend's affair with a teacher will end in disaster, for instance, she tries to prevent the relationship from getting off the ground. Hard as high school may be to navigate, getting through the school halls and social experiences is made more difficult because London simply doesn't remember anything from the day before.

As sparks fly between London and Luke, a new student at school, despite London's attraction to him, he seems disturbingly familiar. But when she looks into her future, she doesn't see Luke. As the two fall deeper in love, London is haunted by Luke's seeming disappearance from her future and her dreams of her attendance at graveside services where she recognizes some of the faces around her, but can't see who is being buried. These turbulent emotions are heightened when she discovers secrets her mother has been hiding from her about the accident that caused her disability.

Although this title starts off promisingly and held my attention for most of the way, my interest flagged about two thirds of the way in. I could never really buy into the idea that while London had lost her past, she somehow could predict her future, and some of the plot twists seemed too contrived to be believed. The long-suffering Luke seemed to be too good to be true, and I wondered why London's teachers weren't more understanding, given that they had to have been informed about the accident and memory loss. Everything is resolved a bit too neatly for my taste, but still, the whole notion of having to recreate your past is intriguing.