Samantha – Sammie – has a rare genetic disease called Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC). This is a real disease that exists outside of fiction. It essentially causes a person’s body and mind to shut down – memory loss leading to dementia, slurred speech, tremors, seizures, and so on, resulting in early death. It’s usually diagnosed in young children, but when it’s diagnosed later, like in Sammie’s case as a teenager, the prognosis is a bit better. People may live a little longer. It’s what Sammie is counting on, since she has a whole life planned out for herself: win the debate competition, graduate as valedictorian from her high school, go to NYU and get her degree, live happily ever after.

Of course, things don’t go as planned. Sammie’s symptoms worsen, and everything she’s worked for seems in jeopardy, despite her dogged determination to remain independent and live the life she’s dreamed of for years. In order to help her with her memory loss, she starts writing the memory book – a record of her life from the time she was diagnosed until she can’t write anymore.

This is a heartbreaking read. The first bit is a little slow, unless you’re a debate nerd, since it chronicles Sammie’s national debate competition, which is where her first real memory loss occurs. Aside from debate, Sammie’s memory book also features her first relationship with her long-time crush, her reconciliation with a childhood friend-maybe-more (one of the sweetest romances I’ve read in contemporary YA fiction), her fight to keep her grades up at school even as her memory fails her, and her eventual realization that none of her plans will come to fruition. After the debate competition and high school graduation, Sammie begins to decline pretty quickly, and her writing style reflects this – less punctuation, more run-on sentences, and disjointed thoughts. At the very end, her friends and family take over the writing of the memory book, and I suggest you have a full box of tissues for those pages.

All fiction is manipulative in some way, but books like The Memory Book – carefully crafted to produce tears – are more manipulative than most. I’m more annoyed by tearjerkers than other books designed to make the reader feel a certain way because they are just not my thing generally; if I want to cry for hours, I’ll listen to a sad song (and I have a whole playlist I just call “Sad,” so I definitely do this). It’s why I haven’t read The Fault in Our Stars and why I avoided all of the Lurlene McDaniel books when I was a kid. This is not to say I avoid all sad books (The Book Thief is one of my all-time favorites and you don’t get much sadder than that in the end), but when the whole point of the book is to make you sad, I usually pass.

All that aside, this is a really well-done example of something I don’t particularly like. Sammie’s voice is strong and clear, even when her mind is almost completely gone, and the relationships between her and her family and friends feel multifaceted and real. Sammie has a really fulfilling and believable character arc: she is so determined to stick to her plans in the beginning, and when the disease forces those plans to change, she resists until she can’t anymore. And eventually, she finds a way to get the most out of what the remainder of her life allows her, which includes genuine romantic love, deep friendships, and more loving bonds with her family. I expect this book will be very meaningful for lots of teens, either as a “what if” scenario or as an example of the choices you can still make even when unwanted circumstances are forced upon you. And for those readers who love a good cry, you can’t do any better than this.

Book borrowed from my local library.