If the town leaders were to discover what Nadia is doing, her punishment would be swift and merciless, but she accepts the risks, hoping her forays over the wall into the forbidden territory beyond will produce some clues.īefore that can happen, she’s caught by a childhood acquaintance who threatens to reveal her secret unless she brings him along on her next trip. Nadia is determined to figure out what causes the Forgetting and to prevent or cure it before it’s too late. She has never told anyone that she remembers, not even when her mother lost her grip on reality or her older sister suggested that Nadia, who favors the forgotten father, is not a true member of the family. When you will not remember who you are or what you’ve done.” How easy to cut the truth away, to throw it in a fire, open your eyes and have the whole world remember nothing of who you are. “Bend a little here, omit a little there, make yourself into the person you wish you were instead of the person you are.

But how easily that truth can be twisted,” Nadia says. “We are supposed to write the truth, for no one to see but ourselves. It was the most traumatic day of Nadia’s life, a trauma compounded by the fact that no one else remembers it, not even her father, who still lives in the village with his new family. When Nadia was six years old, her father used the bizarre event to assume a new identity and abandon the family-her mother, her two sisters, and Nadia-by burning or otherwise altering their books. The Forgetting creates the potential for both tragedy and opportunity. As the ominous event approaches, some people descend into lawlessness and revel in the possibilities of anonymity others write frantically in their books and lock themselves away in fear. No one may read or even touch another person’s books. Filled journals are housed in a huge stone building and zealously protected by Gretchen of the Archives. To counteract the confusion that follows the Forgetting, the citizens of Canaan are required to keep a daily journal to help them remember themselves and their family.

The one thing we should never, ever be separated from.” Nadia is a resident of the walled city-state of Canaan, whose motto is “I Am Made of My Memories.” The story opens seventy days before the next “Forgetting,” a city-wide event that occurs every twelve years and wipes clean the memories of everyone-everyone except Nadia. “Our books are our sole identity after the Forgetting, the string that connects us to who we were before. “I’ve been taught to write truth in my book since I was old enough to hold a pen,” explains eighteen-year-old Nadia in the first chapter of Sharon Cameron’s newest YA fantasy, The Forgetting.

The forgetting by sharon cameron