I'm giving "Memories of the Future" three stars and I'm not sure why--I was not able to plow through it. Maybe because of the writing, which is wonderful, but the plot? I could not stick with it. "The Blazing World" was glorious, but this is a disappointment.

It sounds so appealing--a complex plot mixing past and present presented through the discovery of a notebook the writer, called "Minnesota" here, wrote about her first years in New York City. Who doesn't love that "young person in the big new city" trope? But everything is so disjointed, and her growing obsession with her downstairs neighbor Lucy . . . I couldn't hang with it.

I'm giving this novel 2.5 stars because someday I may go back to it. There's that something about it that can't be explained. I still think about this novel but am not ready to more spend time in that cramped apartment in the 1970s with that girl from Minnesota.