The Reminder Book

Daisy, otherwise known as Daze, hears her dead mother's voice. Sometimes it's because of her dad, who likes to watch old home movies when he can't sleep. Sometimes it's because of her brother, who is too young to remember Mom, and needs to be reminded by looking at photographs and watching videos. Sometimes it might just be her mind trying to work out what her therapist would call "issues." But this time, it’s none of those things. It’s something much more wonderful and much more terrifying, something Daze never thought possible. And it might allow her to do what she couldn't years ago: save her mother's life.

KLIATT

Daze hears her mother's voice in the living room. This would not be unusual except that her mother died some two years ago. Daze, her father and her little brother Ryan have moved to a new house and a new school where Daze's stories about her mother's illness and treatment get her some attention and much sympathy. But she has troubling nightmares, and when she hears her mother's voice she hopes for an instant that what had happened had not happened. In the living room her dad is showing family movies of her mom and Daze when she was a baby. It is a bittersweet moment that turns eerie when she hears her mother's voice in her father's workroom at the university. Daze realizes that her father has developed an artificial intelligence that uses a replica of her mother's head and the sounds of her mother's voice. She arranges her schedule so that she can spend time in the workroom with her artificial "mother" and there overhears that her father has started to see another woman. Daze has a desperate need to hold onto the prototype and goes to great lengths to make sure that Ryan gets a chance to meet his "mother" before her father reclaims the robot and the program that operates it. This is a tightly written, poignant story about loss and truth. Daze's loss and her reactions are heart wrenching, but it is not until the end that readers come face to face with the reality of Daze's nightmare. Reviewer: Janis Flint-Ferguson