Escape From Memory by Margaret Peterson Haddix Kira lives with her mother in a sleepy town in Ohio. She has lived there for thirteen years, since coming from California when she was two. So when her friends hypnotize her as a joke, they are startled when Kira remembers running away from violence when she was very young, and they are even more startled when she remembers words in a language that they do not recognize.
Kira asks tells her mother about the incident, hoping that her mother will tell her more about her past. Instead, her mother angrily tells her that she should never have subjected herself to hypnotism. Furthermore, her mother tells her, she does
not need to know about her past, there are
some things best forgotten. Kira and her friend Lynne do not heed the warning. Instead, they try to snoop into Kira's past, but do not find anything.
Two days later, Kira comes home from school to find that her mother is not there. She calls the library, where her mother works, and is informed that her mother has taken a month-long leave of absence. She waits for her mother, getting more and more scared. Then she finds a note from her mother telling her to go to her friend Lynne's house, but she does not act on it. Finally, a stranger appears at Kira's house and informs her that she is Kira's Aunt Memory. She kidnaps Kira and takes her to Crythe, a town in California that claims to have been founded by the Romans.
Crythe is almost a ghost town, having been destroyed by a civil war. Aunt Memory asks Kira to give a speech to the townspeople, but Kira refuses, wanting to know what is going on. Aunt Memory puts Kira in the dungeon for disobeying, and in the dungeon is Kira's mother, who has also been kidnapped by Aunt Memory.
Kira's mother tells Kira that she is not really her daughter, but her niece. The townspeople of Crythe have perfect memories, and so the Russians tried to use them as a weapon during the cold war. The Crythians could not escape their bad memories, and Kira's parents invented computer technology that could erase or hold memories. That technology is what the woman claiming to be Aunt Memory wants. Go read the book for the rest.
Question: If you had the option to erase your bad memories, would you take it?
Happy reading.
