What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
This topic is about
The Eternal Enemy
SOLVED: Children's/YA
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SOLVED. Science Fiction about time traveling machines. Read in late 1990s. Spoilers ahead. [s]
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Sigh. Still hoping this book turns up. Someone somewhere will remember it, surely?
My husband just found it and I'm so excited! It's The Eternal Enemy by Christopher Pike.
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I'm going to tell the plot in chronological order but it isn't written that way.
The main character (I think her name is Sarah) is witnessing an uprising of mechanical people. I will call them cyborgs but the book might have used a different term like androids, or robots. Her grandfather invented them and they are the only ones capable of time travel. So she attempts suicide (I think. I also think it was very bloody and in a bathroom) so her grandfather will be forced to turn her into a cyborg so she can travel back in time to convince him not to invent them. (this is all revealed at the end, I think the book starts in the middle of her having a weird dream). Traveling back in time erases her memory and she is found wandering the streets. She goes to live with a family and she calls them Mom and Dad even though she knows they aren't really. She goes to highschool and does highschool stuff. She starts to get really close to a boy. We get snippets of things as the story progresses but aren't sure of the larger plot. She sees people who talk about her but not TO her ("Why is she wasting her time on this?" kind of stuff) and sees a doctor for this (a neurologist or a therapist maybe?) The bulk of the book is really weird and confusing but that made me just want to keep reading so I could figure out what was going on. Everything gets revealed at the end of the book. She remembers who she is and why she's there. The boy she had been getting close to is her grandfather. She downloads a message for him from her head to a VCR tape maybe? He watches it and realizes that if he doesn't invent the cyborgs then he'll never see her again. So he resolves to invent them. I think the people she was seeing were other cyborgs who are invisible? or memory fragments maybe? The end of the book insinuates that her grandfather makes the cyborgs and then convinces his eventual daughter to name her daughter (Sarah?) so that he can see her again. It was such a good ending, very sad but also satisfying and I loved the way most of the book was confusing but it all clicked together at the end of it.