MEET ME AT BLUE HOUR

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.