SING ME FORGOTTEN

Magic and music blend in this gender-flipped fantasy take on The Phantom of the Opera.

Seventeen-year-old Isda lives and lurks in the shadows, catwalks, and crypts of the Channe Opera House of Vaureille. Discarded at birth and raised in secret by the calculating Cyril Bardin, Isda helps her adoptive father and the opera by manipulating audience members’ memories through her forbidden gravoir magic. Unlike the indentured fendoirs who legally extract memories as an elixir—sometimes leaving the poor as Memoryless husks—all gravoirs are supposed to be executed at birth, a legacy of the bloody and brief revolution led by three much-mythologized gravoir women, Les Trois. Redheaded Isda has facial disfigurements like all gravoirs and fendoirs, hidden beneath masks that they are forced to wear in public; Isda has adorned hers with sparkling crystals and raven feathers. But the songs of Emeric Rodin, a newly arrived and lowly cleaning boy, stir Isda’s magic and interest, and she begins to tutor him while also fearing addiction to the memories she takes from him. Singing, masquerades, organ music, and chandeliers ensue, elements as indebted to Andrew Lloyd Webber as Gaston Leroux. With Isda, debut author Olson offers a complex and nuanced character who both suffers persecution and commits monstrous acts, pitting typical teenage insecurities against mind-altering powers. Most characters read as White.

A well-choreographed, updated take on a melodramatic classic.