What a book can do.

Hooray for the launch of Angie Smibert’s The Forgetting Curve!  Be sure to check out the entire week’s worth of launch activities at The League of Extraordinary Writers!

I am a huge fan of Angie’s! Memento Nora blew me away. Right after I finished reading it, I emailed Angie and was like… “I want MORE. NOW!” Ever since then I’ve been waiting – rather impatiently, I might add – for The Forgetting Curve. And WOW! The wait was totally worth it!

What I love about The Forgetting Curve (and also what scares the beejeesus out of me) is how readily imaginable it is that what’s happening in the book could happen here in the not-too-distant future.

Angie’s story-telling pulls us immediately into Aiden’s world – a world that peripherally includes Nora and Micah from Memento Nora – and a world that is becoming increasingly threatened by “terrorist” attacks. Except, as we learned in Memento Nora, the terrorists are much closer to home – much more personal. Now Aiden’s cousin – Winter (the sculptor from Memento Nora) has had a “psychotic breakdown” and Aiden’s sent home from Switzerland to help in her recovery. When he sees her, he realizes things are a lot worse than he’d imagined – and not just with Winter, who is far from psychotic!

In The Forgetting Curve, Angie tackles head-on the increasing enmeshment of government and corporations. This involves sale of fear to the masses – a promise of security which means voluntarily giving up certain personal freedoms (sound familiar?) – and then mandatory government/corporate control (all in the name of safety.)

The Forgetting Curve expands on the themes in Memento Nora and makes them even more plausible and chilling. I think Angie’s books should be mandatory reading for everyone! Period.