FF Friday

Gloriously unrealistic soap opera-esque amnesia is one of my absolute favorite tropes. I Remember You runs with all the different levels of fun, angst, and mystery inherent to its premise and keeps things just a little bit more emotionally complex than it's required to, which made me very happy. The writing is sometimes a little clumsy and the resolution is somewhat rushed, but the overall experience is still very enjoyable.

Following one of fiction's more random head injuries, college senior Cara wakes up in a hospital with no memories of her life past prom night senior year of high school, where she wrapped up a disappointing dance by enjoying Good Omens out in her car and acting as designated driver. Now she's surrounded by people calling her "Care," a nickname she's always hated, she regularly drinks and skips class, she listens to hip-hop, she's friends with a huge group of girls who party and exercise and speak almost exclusively in drawling jokes, and she has no idea what's happened with her life. At least she has this super-hot girlfriend, Bibi, who's sitting by her bedside holding her hand. She always knew she'd come out in college--she'd already almost done it a few times in high school. Now if she can just make sense of the rest of the changes she's gone through...

Of course, the dueling POVs quickly tell us what we've already guessed: Bibi isn't Cara's girlfriend, just her close friend and roommate who is repeatedly reassuring herself that this physical contact "isn't gay." And Cara isn't out at all. That last part adds a bit of genuinely mournful wistfulness to the whole premise, as Cara's biggest disappointment upon realizing how much she's misunderstood is that somehow she still hasn't been confident enough to admit the identity she's always known to the people around her. The misunderstanding about Bibi is well-handled, too: when Bibi (obviously) decides to go along with Cara's presumption and starts finding herself genuinely attracted and attached, she knows she eventually has to admit the tangled circumstances, and Cara doesn't hate her for them, but she does, understandably enough, have trouble trusting her for a while.

I liked how Logan set up the mystery about Cara's personality changes. On the one hand, other characters often point out that it's not unusual for a high school-to-college transition to transform someone, so it's not like there's something sinister about Cara having changed: instead, the reader's unease with it all is rooted in how rapidly the change seems to have occurred. At one point, looking for clues about, at least, what she would have read and liked in the intervening years so she can revisit favorite books she doesn't remember, Cara consults her Goodreads account--only to find out that she hasn't updated it since that night at prom. (Mild spoiler: the mystery thankfully doesn't involve sexual assault in any way, and I appreciated Logan steering wide of that cliche.) There's also some fun with Cara's single recovered memory, where she finally flashes back to a family Christmas where her dad wasn't present, but has trouble figuring out if he really wasn't there or if she's just remembering a moment around the table when he happened to have gone to the bathroom. But they were serving lamb, and he hates lamb. A clue? And why is her older sister confiding ominous secrets to Bibi?

Most of all, I really liked how the dilemmas and the supporting cast were granted a good bit of complexity. Both Cara's parents and Bibi's are heavily flawed but still very human--they have trouble doing what's actually best for their daughters, but they clearly love them. There's no annoying geek superiority over "coolness": Cara really does like hip-hop when she starts listening to it and the raunchy party girl friends are ultimately supportive and the source of lasting attachments. Her emotional journey is about balancing her old self with the parts of her new life she actually likes and would freely choose, not about reclaiming some kind of authorially defined purity.

Also, the sex is pretty hot, and often both funny and emotionally rich. There's a great moment where Cara, who knows how high her own sex drive is, assumes that she and Bibi have basically been banging on every available surface in their apartment and she can't wait to get back to that. Bibi's step-by-step discovery of her own real sexual desires, and therefore of her sexual passion, is also well-done (and again, hot). The first spark of romantic interest between the two of them is a little forced, but both their chemistry and the working-out of their relationship is believable and compelling.

Overall, I Remember You strikes a good balance between fun tropes and valuable complexity and makes for an f/f New Adult romance that genuinely captures the weird, unstable-identity aspects of becoming the person you really are/really want to be.