Author: Pete Hautman

Genre: Science Fiction

Rating: 10



When Jack’s Grampa Skoro is sick and placed in the hospital, he and his mother go up to visit. Not only does Skoro try to wring Jack’s neck, but they are forced to move into his house in a strange town called Memory, with a population of 39.

With his father an addicted alcholholic, Jack and his mother struggle to keep everything fine. But when a dream leads Jack to a hidden door in his closet, he finds a path to the past, fifty years ago, that is.

After a small adventure with Andie and Scud, who live in old Memory, Jack returns. Everything in the present starts shaping out. His father stops drinking, and Jack’s mother finds a job.

One day, when Jack visits the small general store in memory, he finds that his father has been specially ordering and buying vodka. Back at home, a huge fight breaks out between his mother and father. His mother ends up dead, killed by her husband.

Knowing that this is the only way he can escape, Jack travels back in fifty years, again, and plans to wait until the fight, to stop his mother’s death.

The readers receives Jack’s stories from a notebook that he’s written: about his time in World War II, life in the hospital, then an institute, and how he became Mrs. Was.

With all the excitement, eerie mystery, and one man’s memory, I was forced to give this book a 10.