You won’t get answers, and you will end up with more questions than you started with, but wow what a powerful story.

We follow an unnamed resident of a facility, a place for people who are told they suffered from a virus that causes memory loss. The other residents all have names from the TV shows (“cartridges”) they watch, which seem retsricted to West Side Story and Friends. I love these choices because of the humor the names provide, especially for those familiar with either of these (characters called Baby John, or even non-primary Friends characters like Kathy and Eddie made me laugh).

That humor is necessary in an otherwise bleak situation. They don’t know who they were before and they don’t even know that they look like. While reading you question the decision of those in charge, and you wonder what really happened because it is clear they are not being told the truth. Why are they being taught what they are taught? What happened to the world? What happens to those who “graduate”? And so many more that I won’t get into because I don’t want to spoil anything,

What they do have? Themselves, whatever it is that makes us, us. And through that we watch interpersonal relationships form, we watch them navigate through their dorms and their courses (with names like “Passive-Aggression”) and most interestingly, we watch as they make sense of the definitions of words and attempt to put them in context, both in their experiences and in their relationships with each other.

Thank you NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.