Author: Sharon Sant
Genre: Young Adult
Cliffhanger: No
HEA: It's more of an ambiguous HEA...
'If there is a hell, I think maybe this is it.'
Weeks after fifteen-year-old David is killed by a speeding driver, he’s still hanging around and he doesn’t know why. The only person who can see and hear him is the girl he spent his schooldays bullying.
Bethany is the most hated girl at school. She hides away, alone with her secrets until, one day, the ghost of a boy killed in a hit-and-run starts to haunt her.
Together, they find that the end is only the beginning…
After getting killed in a hit-and-run, fifteen-year-old David spends the night of the accident sitting beside his bleeding, broken body after he dies. Now a ghost, he walks among his tiny town unseen... until someone does.
"I'm like a shadow; not even that, at least shadows can be seen when the sun is out."David is mean, angry, and a bully... while the town freak, Bethany is a quiet, mysterious loner—whom the whole town thinks is a freak, a weirdo. In life, Bethany and David never spoke. In death, Bethany is the only one David can speak to.
Time passes, but even in death memories fade. As the date of Davids death becomes further in the past, David slowly starts to loose himself... but also starts to find the missing pieces of himself he lost while he was alive.
He believes only Bethany keeps him together, and as the unlikely pair play their memory games, they build a tentative friendship that soon transforms into something deeper, into something... deadly.
I step out onto the road and wait. The car gets closer and closer. It's moving fast, too fast for this twisty-turny lane.I wait... Then it's almost upon me and I want to feel it hit me, I want to remember what pain feels like. I throw out my arms and invite the collision. But it goes clean through me and roars away and I don't feel a thing. The star-strewn skies are framed by the black claws of the trees and I turn my face to them. Is there anybody up there or am I alone?While David and Bethany try to solve the puzzle as to why David is still lingering in life after his death, it was actually quite beautiful to see David's feelings toward Bethany morph from irritated indifference into thoughtful and caring. In that final chapter, it was almost as if he was desperate to cling onto her for both life and death—all those pieces of himself he'd buried six-feet under, as well as the ones he'd found with Bethany after death.
And although I really did enjoy this book, I had to give it a 3-Star rating because the ARC I received read like a first draft. The story needed to be fleshed out more, and—it might've been just my e-book—but the format was off; words ran together, sentences were disjointed, and chapters/paragraphs were merged together into jumps of time that left me a bit discombobulated. But with a bit of rewriting and editing, The Memory Game has the potential to be an amazing book. And maybe, in the e-book's final copy, all the wrinkles in the ARC are smoothed.
Overall, I don't regret reading The Memory Games. The ending left me breathless; teary-eyed and aching for the love gained and life lost in this book. The journey of David and Bethany loosing and finding themselves—somewhere between life, death, and their Memory Games—is defiantly a Young Adult book I'd recommend.
PS:
*I was given an ARC of this book from NetGalley. But I do solemnly
swear that I am up to... good. ;) This is a fair and honest review of
this book. Pinky promise.*
BOOK RATING:
