The Memory Collectors

More Women's Fiction Than Science Fiction. Seven years ago, in 2018's The Space Between, Meserve managed to take a quasi-science/ science fiction concept of a NASA scientist discovering an asteroid behind the sun and spin an electric missing person tale around it - and did so quite well.<br/><br/>Here, she again delves into the "science fiction" element... without ever writing a convincing science fiction book. Yes, it has elements of scifi - the main thrust of the plot is that it is now possible to "time travel" into your own memories and there is now tech to do exactly this. But that is where the science fiction begins and ends here, and other than a (brief) realistic look at the price of such groundbreaking tech and how it would spread to even remotely common use, there really isn't an actual "scifi" bent to this particular tale.<br/><br/>Now, if one approaches this from more of a "women's fiction" tale with a few nods to scifi... it actually works a LOT better and is actually quite a strong story... that just needed those nods to scifi to make it work. As a women's fiction tale of a mother devastated over her son's death and another mother devastated over something she did that can never be forgiven, both seeking to understand what happened and both desperate to have even a few more minutes of their lives before said events... this is a truly compelling tale. <br/><br/>Meserve manages to weave all four central characters' stories together seamlessly, though the fact that all use the same tenses and even the same verbal stylings *can* make it a bit hard to distinguish which character you're reading, particularly in the beginning bits of a hand-off. And still, you can almost see TV/ film producer Meserve - her "day job" when she's not writing - thinking of camera angles