BOOK REVIEWS Courtesy of Beaverdale Books
Courtesy of Beaverdale Books
‘My Name is Memory’
By Ann Brashares
Riverhead Books
Pub Date: 6/1/2010
$25.95
336 pp
When Daniel transfers to her high school, Lucy is instantly attracted to the handsome, reflective stranger who seems mature beyond his years. Her attachment is obsessive and passionate, but sadly one-sided — or so she thinks. Daniel has loved Lucy since he first saw her, nearly 1,500 years earlier, while committing a horrible act that has haunted him across dozens of lifetimes.
Daniel has “the memory,” the ability to remember every life he has lived and even recognize the souls of people from past lives. In every life, his only desire is to find the woman he calls Sophia — now Lucy — and earn her love. She, however, has an ordinary memory that cannot explain her soul’s eternal longing for Daniel’s.
As this gripping and magical story unfolds, we learn of many of Daniel’s lives — those which shape him and those in which he briefly finds the soul he recognizes as Sophia, and perhaps convinces her to love him. However, Daniel is not the only person with the memory. The man who was once Daniels’s cruel, sadistic brother is also traveling across time searching for Sophia, and he will stop at nothing to destroy their desperate chance at love, even as she begins to remember her past with Daniel. Will their two souls, only occasionally flung together over many lifetimes, always barely missing their destiny, ever truly be united?
“My Name is Memory” is an achingly beautiful story of love and destiny that transcends tragedy and even death. Enjoy this captivating and inspiring new novel by the bestselling author of “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” CV
