The Memory Index by Julian R. Vaca Review

 Good Morning Everyone :)

Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians, and Happy Friday to everyone visiting from somewhere else.

I have to be honest that this is always one of my least favorite days of the year just because it's always absolute madness at work today, and I always look forward to putting this day behind me for another year.

Before all the craziness gets underway though, I thought I'd love to go ahead and share my review of an upcoming dystopian young adult release with you all that I was really looking forward to reading.

Keep reading below for my full review.

The Memory Index by Julian R. Vaca:

Source: Publisher via NetGalley

Publisher: Thomas Nelson

Publication Date: August 9th, 2022

Genre: Young Adult Fiction/Science Fiction/Dystopian

Synopsis:

In a world where memories are like currency, dreams can be a complicated business.

In an alternative 1987, a disease ravages human memories. There is no cure, only artificial recall. The lucky ones--the recollectors--need the treatment only once a day.

Freya Izquierdo isn't lucky. The high school senior is a "degen" who needs artificial recall several times a day. Plagued by blinding half-memories that take her to her knees, she's desperate to remember everything that will help her investigate her father's violent death. When her sleuthing almost lands her in jail, a shadowy school dean selects her to attend his Foxtail Academy, where five hundred students will trial a new tech said to make artificial recall obsolete.

She's the only degen on campus. Why was she chosen? Freya is nothing like the other students, not even her new friends Ollie, Chase, and the alluring Fletcher Cohen. Definitely not at all like the students who start to vanish, one by one. And nothing like the mysterious Dean Mendelsohn, who has a bunker deep in the woods behind the school.

Nothing can prepare Freya and her friends for the truth of what that bunker holds. And what kind of memories she'll have to access to survive it. 

(synopsis from goodreads)

My Review:

I had really high hopes going into this one, as it has honestly been such a long time since I last read a truly amazing dystopian/science fiction type of young adult novel. When the prologue started everything out with a bang, I thought I'd finally found the story I've been long waiting for, but sadly everything went downhill from there, and this one honestly left me highly disappointed.

I have to be honest and start by stating that I wasn't personally a fan of the setting being the late 1980's. It was an interesting idea, but I thought the execution wasn't handled the greatest, and I got weary of almost every single chapter highlighting the fact that the teens were listening to a particular song or artist from that era whenever they turned music on. It kind of started to feel like the author was just trying to overemphasize the fact that the setting was the 1980's, and it started to feel a little cringy.

I had quite a hard time following a lot of the story, and it especially seemed to drag throughout the middle. All of the set up for the memory loss pieces was kind of boring and hard to muddle through, and by the end of the story I'm still not sure I knew what was what concerning it, and I didn't really feel like I was invested enough to go back and find out.

I didn't feel that a lot of the questions that were raised throughout the story were answered, and while I did end up loving the crazy way it ended, I don't think this one intrigued me enough to want to go ahead and read a sequel if there ever is one.

Overall, I loved the ideas behind this one, but the execution wasn't done too well in my opinion, and it failed to hold my interest.

It won't personally be one I'll be recommending, but if you're a fan of dystopian/science fiction young adult novels, and enjoy books that are set in the 1980's, then this one might just be the book for you. 

Final Rating: 2/5.

Thanks so much to Thomas Nelson for allowing me to advance read and review this one!

I voluntarily read and reviewed a complimentary copy of this novel from the publisher (Thomas Nelson) via NetGalley. I was not required to give a positive review. This is my honest review, and all thoughts and opinions are my own.

Thanks so much for reading guys! Have a great rest of your weekend, and I look forward to sharing more bookish fun with you all next week!