- Keep Me in Mind by Jaime Reed
2016 [336p]
Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-545-88381-8 $17.99
E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-545-88383-2 $17.99
Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10
Ellia and Liam are deeply in love and supportive of each other’s dreams; Ellia wants to get out from under the expectation she’ll follow in her father’s engineering footsteps as an engineer, and Liam wants to pursue a career as a writer, something his working class father doesn’t understand. When sixteen-year-old Ellia has an accident that leaves her with no memory of the last two years, Liam is devastated; her entire memory of him and their relationship has been wiped clean, and their fathers, who never approved of their relationship in the first place, are elated. The problem wasn’t race—Liam is white and Ellia is black—but class, and, as Ellia learns from her friends, a misguided notion that Liam was encouraging Ellia to party and do other crazy things. In truth, it was Ellia who coaxed Liam along on her wild adventures as he displaced his grief over his mother’s abandonment. As they struggle to see if they have a future without this shared past, Ellia comes to realize that their relationship was built on the shaky ground where her rebellion met his need. Reed develops her teen characters with style as well as substance; Ellia and Liam are given distinct, believable first-person voices in alternating chapters, and their friends vary between playfully goofy and helpfully pushy in realistic succession. The introduction of a character who has anterograde amnesia offers an informative counterpoint to Ellia’s retrograde variety as well as a potential site of romantic tension, but what Reed pulls off here is far more interesting than a clichéd love triangle: a scenario where a mature reflection on an immature first love makes plot sense and still leaves room for seeing a path forward.