Book Review: Don’t You Forget About Me by Kate Karyus Quinn

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(Don’t You) Forget About Me
Author: Kate Karyus Quinn
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Fantasy | Paranormal
Released: June 10th 2014
Review Source: HarperTeen

Welcome to Gardnerville.

A place where no one gets sick. And no one ever dies.

Except...
There’s a price to pay for paradise. Every fourth year, the strange power that fuels the town exacts its payment by infecting teens with deadly urges. In a normal year in Gardnerville, teens might stop talking to their best friends. In a fourth year, they’d kill them.

Four years ago, Skylar’s sister, Piper, was locked away after leading sixteen of her classmates to a watery grave. Since then, Skylar has lived in a numb haze, struggling to forget her past and dull the pain of losing her sister. But the secrets and memories Piper left behind keep taunting Skylar—whispering that the only way to get her sister back is to stop Gardnerville’s murderous cycle once and for all.

(Don’t You) Forget About Me takes place in a town where nobody dies and illness and terminal sickness is nonexistent, but with such a luxury there will always be a price to pay. The price these residents pay is that during every fourth year a teenager will have these sudden urges that will result in either many people getting hurt or dying. The story follows Skylar four years after her own sister, Piper, had a group of teens follow her into a watery death. All Skylar wants is to have her sister out of the reformatory, but will she be able to with being under a cloud of constant haze? Throughout the story we go back and forth between past and present getting to see Skylar before and after Piper led teens into drowning themselves. All throughout both present and past we are getting little tidbits that definitely add up to the crazy reveal in the end. When we first meet Skylar she is under a constant haze of not knowing what’s going on or what even just happened an hour ago due to “forget me nots” pills formed to help people obviously forget. They are also intended to get teens to not have these urges that will ultimately end in a horrific death of many of their peers. When a girl, LuAnn, gets released from the reformatory keeps saying she is Piper and after she is released LuAnn’s brother confides in Skylar and gives an eerie note asking her for help. After these events unfold Skylar believes this is Piper sending messages to get herself out of the reformatory and Skylar needs to get sober from the forget me nots and get to know what’s actually going on around her, she needs to remember.

I enjoyed this story it was definitely interesting and strange. For me though it was slow in parts, but everything had a part in pulling the ending together. If the ending in itself totally threw me off I’m not sure I would have liked it as much. It really pulled all the small things together and made them have a purpose. This book won’t be for someone looking for a high paced story, but this book was eerie and I definitely liked the feel of it and I would recommend this to someone who likes taking everything in, the small stuff and the big stuff.