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I have rarely in my life read a YA series where I loved the first book, and then the second book was even better. Pintip Dunn’s Remember Yesterday is no sequel written merely to fulfill a book deal or cash in on the first book. This is a fully-fledged and masterfully interlinked continuation of a story that gripped me from the moment I started reading.
Because these books are so powerfully connected, you should absolutely not read this book until you’ve read Forget Tomorrow, which is the first (and to which I also gave DIK status). In fact, you should not even read this review, because the entire plot of Remember Yesterday is about resolving the cliffhanger ending of the previous book.
Close this tab, go read Forget Tomorrow, and come back in a day (trust me, you’ll read it that fast). The rest of you, come along!
Callie Stone discovered that future memory technology would be used to justify genocide. Since she and her sister Jessa were the key to discovering that technology, and since Callie couldn’t bear to kill Jessa, Callie killed herself – sort of. We last saw her consciousness floating, lost in time, at the end of Forget Tomorrow.
Ten years later, sixteen-year-old Jessa has grown up in the shadow of Callie’s sacrifice, never feeling like she has done or achieved anything worthy of her sister’s world-disrupting, fate-thwarting act. Suddenly, and I hate to give more detail than this, she discovers that there is a way for her to make it up to Callie. To do so, she must link up with Tanner Callahan, a scientific prodigy. Since Callie’s destruction of the regular timeline, Tanner has become the government’s hope for a different route to discovering future memory – and it’s turned him into a jerk. And, much to Jessa’s distress, a hot one.
While I loved the previous book, Callie and Logan were both relatively pure-hearted, simple characters. That’s not the case with Jessa and Tanner, and the book is the richer for it. Jessa is hyperactive and rebellious, resentful towards her mother, who refused to leave Eden City to take Jessa to safety in exile. Tanner is not just rude but also morally dubious, with a data-is-everything attitude to science that blinds him to humans and ethics. While Jessa’s hormonal draw to Tanner is high, and there’s a lot more making out in this book than the last one, I appreciated that the author also gives Tanner concrete actions to justify Jessa’s being drawn to him (at least, of course, until Tanner takes two steps back again).
Dunn’s supporting characters continue to be rewardingly rich and complicated – especially Jessa’s mother, who, in my opinion, is the background heroine of the two-book arc (this is the second book in the Forget Tomorrow trilogy, but the story reaches an equilibrium at the end of it. I’m going to read the third book because these have been so great, but you wouldn’t actually have to).
The last book introduced the concept of time travel as something Callie’s father had experimented with. Remember Yesterday throws itself fully and masterfully into this concept. It’s so hard to create tension in plotlines about the ‘foreordained’, and Dunn does it with flair. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just tell you that it’s both brilliantly technical and fully human.
Our reviewer’s DIK of Star-Crossed brought Pintip Dunn to my attention. I would be thrilled if I could get you as addicted to this great author as I now am. Please go give her a try!
Buy it at: Amazon/Apple Books/Barnes & Noble/Kobo
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Grade: A
Book Type: Young Adult
Sensuality: Kisses
Review Date: 15/11/19
Publication Date: 11/2016
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.