I received a sample for this review/feature. Opinions expressed are my own.
Reading is my all time favorite hobby but with 3 children at home I have so little time to actually read books just for me. My world revolves around children’s books and that is great but I find my mind really needs periods of time to relax from my hectic mom schedule. The best way for me to do that is to read a book without pictures in it….and maybe characters with more depth than what can be revealed in a few dozen pages. The latest book on my nightstand is The Book of M and to sum it up in one word….WOW…completely worth using my precious free time to read!
WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE UP TO REMEMBER?
Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.
One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears?an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.
Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.
Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.
As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.
Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down.
Photo ? 2017 Rachel Crittenden
Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where she rode horses and trained in classical ballet. She earned her MFA in creative writing from New York University, and has lived in Beijing; London; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; and New York City. The Book of M is her first novel.
I have always had a love for books that are a little bit fantasy filled whether it be in space or the future or in the case of The Book of M…an apocalypse. This is the type of book I would have picked up to read even if I was not given an advance copy. This dystopian debut shows you how important memories are to your every day life from eating and talking to remembering who your loved ones are. Shepherd offers a unique story illuminating the importance of shared memories.? Max and Ory have survived years into the apocalypse that has taken people’s shadows and then their memories. They survive and they have each other…until Max loses her shadow. Ory must go out for food and despite not seeing anyone for over a year finds out there are other survivors and that many are heading south to where they think they will find answers. Ory rushes back to share his supplies and news to find Max has left him to protect him…from her. With each page I turn I still have hope that everything will work out in the end and Ory has that hope as well as he is willing to risk his life to follow Ory and be with her even as the horrible ailment slowly consumes her. The Book of M is a book that I would highly recommend!
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