(Don’t You) Forget About Me by Kate Karyus Quinn (review)

A sleepy little town in the mountains, Gardnerville offers its residents a golden life, an illness-free existence that might last even hundreds of years—if, that is, they manage to make it through adolescence. Whatever power fuels the town’s life-giving properties needs to be fed, and every four years, it causes a teenager (or several) to go berserk, using formerly underwhelming magical powers to kill—often in spectacularly gory fashion—to sate the power’s hunger. Four years ago, Skylar’s sister Piper enticed sixteen sleepwalking teenagers to leap to their deaths off a bridge; she has been locked up in the reformatory ever since, and Skylar is certain the only way to get her sister’s freedom is to destroy Gardnerville and all it stands for. Quinn blends eloquent prose and startling imagery to create a truly creepy small town, one in which the elders have essentially traded their offspring for eternal youth. Readers are dropped right in the middle of Gardnerville and left disoriented, but intriguingly so; a drug addiction has left Skylar’s memory riddled with holes, and her susceptibility to flashbacks and/or hallucinations gives the story’s trajectory an enigmatic and unstable feel. Nothing is as it seems, even the plot twists; the trope of the big reveal is thoroughly subverted here, with several characters disclosing supposed truths that are either refuted or complicated in later scenes and the ultimate interpretation left up to the reader. This disturbing contemplation on morality, memory, and the fictions we construct to survive will find an audience among fans of Brenna Yovanoff (The Replacement, BCCB 9/10) and Dia Reeves (Bleeding Violet, BCCB 3/10).