Title: Remember For Me

Author: Diana Tarant Schmidt

Genre: Contemporary, Sci-Fi

Format: eBook

Page Count: 276

Release Date: May 25, 2016

Synopsis:

Clara Eros thought her life was ending with Alzheimer’s. She was mistaken. A war between good and evil has raged for as long as humanity has existed, and the balance of power between its forces has always remained equal. But that longstanding balance has begun to shift, and the survival of mankind may be at risk. What is the source of this duality, and how do the proponents of light and darkness use humans to further their cause? When Clara Eros awakens with no memory, her questions are fundamental: who is she; and why is she here? The answer she receives is predetermined and singular: she has been recruited to fight a battle against the reign of darkness. But is Clara just a pawn in a much larger game? Once her transformation is complete, Clara finds herself, in body and mind, as a younger, stronger version of the person she can no longer remember, and now she must search for the common thread hidden within malevolence and turn the tide in a war where humanity is succumbing to chaos and brutality. Will she be strong enough to bring humanity back into the light?

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. This in no way effects my overall rating of this book.

This review is going to be a hard one to write. Firstly, I’d like to point out that this book took me over a month to read. I was able to finish it much quicker once I got myself a Kindle to read it on because my phone just wasn’t working out (don’t ever read books on your phone – it is the most frustrating thing ever).

Due to this, my thoughts on the book might be a bit based on how my reading experience was rather than the actual book itself. Despite the amount of time it took me to finish this book, I would call it a quick read. When I did sit down and read this book, I was glued to the story and the characters.

The book started out really sad. Our main character has Alzheimer’s and is in a hospital just waiting to die. Our other main character is a child with Cancer barely holding onto his life. The way Schmidt wrote these circumstances (from the perspective of her daughter and his mother, respectively) absolutely broke my heart.

The actual premise of the book confused me a bit. Basically the idea is people die and then they come back in different bodies (that are actually the same, just them at a different age than when they died I guess?) for the purpose of fighting the evil in the world (terrorists and such) in the shadows.

Since they still look like themselves, just at a different stage of life than when they died, they should still be careful about any public appearances they make so they won’t be recognized because wouldn’t that be confusing to see your dead grandmother when she was 30 years old on NBC?

Although I felt for the characters I never felt truly connected with them. I can’t quite say why. I felt for what they were going through, but I never felt like they were real. The relationships felt a bit under-developed. This is just what I thought. Someone else might read this and think that the relationships were more developed than me, but from what I got from this book, I would have liked to have the complexities of the character’s relationships to one another explored more.

This lack of feeling towards the character relationships as well as the disconnect from some of the characters had me… not caring about what happened to them. Obviously I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them, but with the situations they were put in I should have been feeling more stressed about whether they’d make it out alive or not, but I ended up feeling nothing.

I also felt like there wasn’t much of a plot? Like, they work in a secret organization that tries to stop terrorist attacks and disasters from happening, but nothing truly seemed to happen in the entire book. Towards the end there was a sort of climax that was… anticlimactic to be completely honest. I was let down by the ending because I 1) didn’t understand what had happened and 2) didn’t care about what had happened.

Like I said earlier, this is unfortunate because there was a lot of potential for this book to be something amazing, but it ended up letting me down in the end.

My Rating: 3 Stars

Overall I liked the premise and the writing was interesting enough to keep me engaged but I couldn’t get connected to the characters and it took me way too long to read than I would have liked. I would recommend, nonetheless!

TW: Death, grief

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