My Name is Memory by Ann Brashares

I just read about this book on one of the book blogs I follow (bookfinds.com/blog) and I'm doing small herkies at my desk because this book sounds A-MAY-ZING.

It's by the same author (Ann Brashares) who wrote Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. This is a very young adult book that I'm not afraid to say I love and also own. She also wrote a chick-lit book last summer, The Last Summer (of You and Me), which was also good...but not great. I wouldn't go out of your way to read it.

But holy cow! This book sounds really good. (Maybe a little Nicholas Sparks-ish, though.)


Summary:  Daniel has spent many lifetimes falling in love with the same girl, in different guises. Over the span of more than a thousand years, across epochs and continents, he and Sophia—whose names and forms change from one life to the next—have been drawn together…and Daniel remembers it all. He has “the Memory”, an ability to recall his past lives and to recognize the souls of the people he used to know. It’s a blessing and a curse—for every time that he and Sophia have managed to find each other, they’ve always been torn tragically, fatally apart.

In small-town Hopewood, Virginia, in the present-day, Daniel has yet another chance to be with Sophia—now “Lucy”—where they are both seniors at the local high school. Unlike Daniel, Lucy’s memory is ordinary; still, she has felt an unusual connection to Daniel since she first laid eyes on him a year earlier.  If they are to be together, Daniel must convince Lucy of their rich but ill-fated history together: of their time together in England during the Great War when he was an injured infantryman and she his dutiful caretaker; of their impossible love in 773 A.D. in Pergamum, Asia Minor, when she was the unhappy wife of his vindictive brother; and, further back still, of their tragic first meeting in 541 A.D. in a humble village in north Africa, when he was a soldier and she the young victim of a senseless attack.

But just as the initially hesitant Lucy begins to awaken to their shared history, the apparent dark force that has come between them time and again, returns.  Theirs is a love with the force of centuries, but if they are to finally spend a lifetime together, they must face a hatred just as ancient.