The Memory Eater
by Rebecca Mahoney
High School    Razorbill/Penguin    336 pp.
3/23    9780593524602    $18.99
e-book ed.  9780593524619    $10.99

To the town of Whistler Beach, Maine, the Memory Eater—a creature confined to a cave who consumes people’s unwanted memories—is big business. And that business depends on seventeen-year-old Alana Harlow. Like generations of Harlows before her, it’s Alana’s job to keep the Memory Eater in the cave and to make sure it feeds only on the memories clients offer. One day Alana makes a mistake that allows the monster to escape; starving, it attacks town residents, taking their memories without permission. (Alana knows the feeling: trying to recall a memory that the Memory Eater took is “like missing a stair. The swoop of air where solid ground should be. And then the drop.”) With the help of her best friend and her ex-girlfriend (or, she’d prefer, not-so-ex-), Alana investigates the origins of the Memory Eater, uncovering a two-hundred-year-old family secret that connects them. It’s a discovery that transforms her goal from subduing and controlling a monster to understanding it; in Mahoney’s deliberate, evocative prose, the terror and guilt the character feels are slowly replaced by empathy and love. As in Laure’s Remember Me (rev. 3/22), the fantasy element of removing a person’s memories is intriguing but feels secondary—here, it is Alana’s willingness to experience her emotions, to receive others’ pain, and to lean on her community for support that stand out.

Pubissue-From the May/June 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.