Meet Me at Blue Hour

February 1, 2025
In a world where memory tampering is possible, two Korean Canadian teens deal with the repercussions of memory loss. Seventeen-year-old Yena Bae is in Busan, South Korea, for the summer, working at her divorced mother's memory erasure clinic. When she runs into her childhood best friend, Lucas Pak, who left Vancouver for Alberta without a word, she's shocked--they're halfway around the world and, having discovered his memory tape at the clinic, she knows he had his memories of her erased. Lucas is in Busan visiting his grandfather, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Lucas hopes to enroll Harabeoji in the clinic's new memory restoration trial. As Lucas enlists Yena's help, she struggles with questions around his motivations while having to keep their old friendship a secret to protect him from complications of the erasure procedure. At the same time, Lucas can't shake the feeling that people are hiding something. This story explores the grief of carrying formerly shared memories alone, while also offering readers an earnest budding romance. The narrative alternates between the leads' perspectives and includes a rich tapestry of settings (a bamboo forest, a fish market) as well as flashback vignettes from the points of view of various inanimate objects (a popcorn machine, a lawn mower) whose sounds were captured on cassette tapes used for the memory erasure procedures. The novel's speculative premise offers musings on the social consequences of technology as an intriguing backdrop for a gentle friends-to-lovers romance. Thought-provoking and comforting.(Speculative romance. 13-18)

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2025
Grades 9-12 The place where memories go to die is where Yena Bae is interning for the summer, and it's also the company her genius scientist mother started out of her apartment. Sori of Us uses the sounds in memories to remove those memories upon request; the sounds are preserved on cassette tapes, which Yena will spend her summer inventorying. However, the summer takes a turn for the complicated when she runs into Lucas, her childhood best friend, and learns that she has been erased from his memory using her mother's technology. The interconnectivity of memory, community, and self is explored in ways that read as authentic, despite the near-future sf premise. Meanwhile, Yena's and Lucas' backstory is revealed through the perspective of sound-making inanimate objects during key memories, leading up to a surprising twist. While this is overall effective for the narrative, it does at times make the characters' markedly adult dialogue patterns more jarring. With a contemplative mood and medium pacing, this is a great bridge between contemporary and science fiction.

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