The Memory Index
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
In this electric speculative YA sci/fi novel, the world treats memories like currency, so dreams can be a complicated business. Perfect for fans of Neal Stephenson and Philip K. Dick.
In an alternative 1987, a disease ravages human memories. There is no cure, only artificial recall. The lucky ones—the recollectors—need the treatment only once a day.
Freya Izquierdo isn’t lucky. The high school senior is a “degen” who needs artificial recall several times a day. Plagued by blinding half-memories that take her to her knees, she’s desperate to remember everything that will help her investigate her father’s violent death. When her sleuthing almost lands her in jail, a shadowy school dean selects her to attend his Foxtail Academy, where five hundred students will trial a new tech said to make artificial recall obsolete.
She’s the only degen on campus. Why was she chosen? Freya is nothing like the other students, not even her new friends Ollie, Chase, and the alluring Fletcher Cohen. Definitely not at all like the students who start to vanish, one by one. And nothing like the mysterious Dean Mendelsohn, who has a bunker deep in the woods behind the school.
Nothing can prepare Freya and her friends for the truth of what that bunker holds. And what kind of memories she’ll have to access to survive it.
“Vaca’s debut is a thrilling and often unsettling examination of the elusive nature of memory and truth. The Memory Index will leave you breathlessly turning pages until its satisfying conclusion.” —Jonathan Evison, New York Times bestselling author of Small World
Get hooked on The Memory Index Duology:
Book 1: The Memory IndexBook 2: The Recall Paradox (coming Spring 2023)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vaca's mind-bending, 1987-set debut centers a quartet of teens attempting to uncover the secrets behind Memory Killer, a disease afflicting humankind that renders people unable to retain a large portion of their memories without artificial aid. Despite the Memory Killer's prevalence, many consider 17-year-old Mexican American foster kid Freya Izquierdo a second-class citizen because she needs the help of artificial recall tech to access more than half her memories. Meanwhile, congressman's son Fletcher Cohen, also 17, is one of the luckier victims of the disease; he's a "recollector," someone who can remember up to 75% of their memories naturally. Their paths cross when the teens receive invitations to Foxtail Academy in rural Tennessee, a boarding school where students will test a new device from Memory Frontier, a corporation that promises to revolutionize recall. Strange happenings and student disappearances cause Freya and Fletcher, along with their respective roommates, to suspect nefarious activity at the school. Via expansive worldbuilding and complex characters, Vaca adeptly combines a mysterious disease, corporate malfeasance, a sprinkling of romance, and good old-fashioned teen sleuthing to deliver an absorbing adventure. An '80s music playlist concludes. Ages 13–up.
