When Blue woke up for school, things didn’t seem quite right. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but things were just off. And then she found the note on her dresser—Meet me on the Little Blue Bus, 7:45, 5/19/32.
Her school besties picked her up for the ride to school, Turtle driving her Jeep and Jack sitting beside her. Blue gets in the car and rides along to school, listening to them talk about senior prank day. The class had gone with an agricultural theme, leaving hay in parking spots and sabotaging many faculty with unexpected water drops. Blue is a little sad about that, how her two best friends are just a week away from graduation, and she still has another year. And Turtle and Jack are so in love, and she’s alone.
Blue goes about her day, despite a bad headache and that nagging feeling that something is wrong. But when she gets to her photography class, she knows something is wrong. All of her work for the entire semester has been ruined. There are streaks where her photos were. The teacher assures Blue that she did the work and got full credit for it, but she can’t explain why Blue has no photos to show for that.
Blue can’t explain why or how there are gaps in her memory, but she’s determined to find out, and she’s going to start by getting on that Little Blue Bus tomorrow, her birthday, and seeing where it takes her.
As soon as she gets on the bus, the driver recognizes her. Blue’s memory is still blank. She grabs a seat and rides as they head up the mountain. She hadn’t remembered the Little Blue Bus at all. She’d had to look it up online to find out what it was, after she read that note. The Little Blue Bus runs from her small town of Owl Nook, New Mexico, up the mountain, so those who ski and snowboard have a direct route to the slopes. The bus continues to make stops up the mountain, and that’s when he gets on.
Blue takes one look at him and knows that this person is significant to her. He sits next to her and introduces himself as Adam. And he has a question for her: “Do you remember me at all?”
Blue is desolate to realize that he has memories of her, but she has nothing in her mind where her memories were. Her journey to try to figure out what happened to her reveals so many secrets, so much pain, so much that had been lost to her. And she has to make a choice—does she want simply to move forward to her life, or does she want to try to recover those memories . . . along with the pain that almost broke her?
Remember Me is a heartbreaking novel of teenage love, loss, and endless grief. The intensity of the feelings comes through every page as Blue and her friends and family go through all the worst that life can serve up and try to keep moving forward. A powerful novel of mental illness and health, of love and hope, of loss and healing, Remember Me is author Estelle Laure’s compelling call to live through the pain and find our way to the other side.
I thought Remember Me was devastating and beautiful. Blue’s pain is so visceral, her grief so consuming, that you can see how she got to the end of her sanity. But watching her journey to the bottom and then back up is inspiring for those of us who face mental illness and want to believe in a future. This book is intense, so it may not be appropriate for everyone, but it does offer a compelling perspective on those who struggle to fit in, struggle to deal with their strong emotions, and struggle to find their place. This is an important book, and I hope the readers who need this story will be able to find it. Because I know those readers are out there.
Egalleys for Remember Me were provided by Wednesday Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.
