My home is filled with heirlooms and mementos, each associated with a person or time from my past. Wherever we moved, settling these things into the house transformed it into a home.
Some of these things make me a little sad, but most make me happy. I have good memories of the student lamp from Great-Grandma's house, the 1842 ogee clock we bought at our first auction, the cracked glass miniature vases Mom set on her knick-knack self, the fourth generation back heirloom Blue Flow soup bowls, the embroidery mom made for me, the Japan figures gifted to my husband on his birth.
Very few people look at these things and feel the things I feel when I see them.
But...what if the emotions people feel could attach to their things and be sensed by others? What if these emotions changed those who encounter the objects? What if some people could sense this emotional baggage and use it for harm or health?
Kim Neville's debut novel The Memory Collectors imagines people with the special ability to sense the emotions that cling to things.
Ev tries to control it, suppressing the effects of the 'stains' on things. She saw how her father fell victim to dark stains. She was unable to save her parents from the evil that overtook him. She has tried to protect her younger sister, Noemi, who flits in and out of her life.
Harriet has hoarded these stained things. They are overwhelming her and affecting her neighbors, too. Perhaps she could make a museum filled with good feelings, a place of healing? When she mets Ev, she knows she has found the person who can help her.
We can hide from the past, suppress it, reject it. We can become enslaved to the past so it inhibits our growth. We can shape the past into works of art. And we can rise above the past to become changed and whole people.
The Memory Collectors is a fantastic story that uses fantasy to explore our common human struggle with the past and the lingering emotions that inhibit our growth.
I received a free ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
Atria Books
ISBN: 1982157585 (ISBN13: 9781982157586)
Paperback $17.00
from the publisher
Ev has a mysterious ability, one that she feels is more a curse than a gift. She can feel the emotions people leave behind on objects and believes that most of them need to be handled extremely carefully, and—if at all possible—destroyed. The harmless ones she sells at Vancouver’s Chinatown Night Market to scrape together a living, but even that fills her with trepidation. Meanwhile, in another part of town, Harriet hoards thousands of these treasures and is starting to make her neighbors sick as the overabundance of heightened emotions start seeping through her apartment walls.
When the two women meet, Harriet knows that Ev is the only person who can help her make something truly spectacular of her collection. A museum of memory that not only feels warm and inviting but can heal the emotional wounds many people unknowingly carry around. They only know of one other person like them, and they fear the dark effects these objects had on him. Together, they help each other to develop and control their gift, so that what happened to him never happens again. But unbeknownst to them, the same darkness is wrapping itself around another, dragging them down a path that already destroyed Ev’s family once, and threatens to annihilate what little she has left.
The Memory Collectors casts the everyday in a new light, speaking volumes to the hold that our past has over us—contained, at times, in seemingly innocuous objects—and uncovering a truth that both women have tried hard to bury with their pasts: not all magpies collect shiny things—sometimes they gather darkness.
