There’s been a trend in teen terminal diseases in YA novels, at least since Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper. It’s a fairly reliable format because it is automatically moving and brings up many issues of life and death. In The Memory Book, Lara Avey raises the stakes, with a diary kept by high school senior Sammy who has a progressive fatal disease that gives her dementia before she dies. She is an honors student who has been accepted into NYU and she hopes that the disease does not progress too swiftly because she wants to have at least a semester of college. The novel is her “memory book” to her future self to explain her life, so her future self can cope better. It’s not a plausible premise but it is a good device for Sammy to set out the details of her life, her hopes, and her setbacks. She has Niemann-Pick Disease Type C, and we learn about the condition through her story.  She is feisty and determined, and so she is a likeable narrator.  She likes philosophy and debating, and her teachers love her. She has a best friend Connor who turns out also to be a romantic interest, and they spend a lot of time together.  But there is also another boy who likes her, so there is some drama. But inevitably even with growing intimacy and care, there is also loss and sadness. The story moves along with a good pace, and the characters are all interesting if a bit two dimensional. Avery’s novel is more compelling as a story of a disease, providing education about how it progresses and how people can cope with knowledge of what is to come. Casey Holloway reads the unabridged audiobook, and she is good at making Sammy sound like a teen and giving life to the other characters.

© 2016 Christian Perring

Christian Perring reviews many novels about mental and neurological illness.