MEMENTO NORA

“I’m about to forget everything I’m going to tell you,” declares preppy 15-year-old Nora James in her opening therapeutic statement at the local Detention Center. Ever since a plane struck the Golden Gate Bridge, Coalition bombings have occurred regularly throughout the DC suburb, and residents remain in constant fear. For those who can afford it, a single pill at an area Therapeutic Forgetting Clinic will erase these traumatic memories and turn everything “glossy.” While this dystopian debut centers on Nora, two other Homeland Inc. Senior High students—artists Micah and Winter—offer their therapeutic statements in short, quick-paced, alternating chapters, which lead up to their Detention capture. As the unlikely trio bands together to produce Memento, an underground comic about the corruption of the TFC and Homeland Inc., they begin to learn more about the true bombing culprit—and each other. Micah and his single mom eke out an existence at a salvage-yard commune; Winter’s parents, engineers at their family’s mobile company, the biggest in North America, have been lost to Detention for over a year. Nora suspects that her father’s role at Soft Target Security may be linked to the bombings—and her own forgetfulness. Lingering questions will be answered in a sequel. Not bad for reluctant readers, but Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (2008) tells a similar story so much better. (Dystopia. YA)