FICTION
My Name Is Memory, by Ann Brashares, $25.95
Daniel Grey has been carrying around a secret for more than 1,000 years. In “My Name Is Memory,” the author of the blockbuster “Traveling Pants” series for teens, Ann Brashares, unspools her second novel for adults.
It’s the story of a man gifted with “the memory” — the ability to recall his past lives. What’s more, Daniel can recognize souls he has previously known, which is the source of his greatest loneliness and hope.
In one of his earliest incarnations, as a young soldier in north Africa in the year 541, Daniel commits an atrocity, and the face of his green-eyed victim haunts him. A few hundred years later, he encounters her in a new body, and this time he rescues and falls in love with her. But in the process, he makes a powerful enemy, one whose memory also stretches back beyond death.
Brashares’ fantastical romance hopscotches between the present day — where Daniel and his love, Lucy, meet as students in Virginia — and their former lives, where they’ve always been mismatched by time and circumstance. At one point, she nurses him after he is wounded in World War I. “You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives,” Daniel tells her just before he dies. “It’s you who makes me a person.”
As past and present hurtle toward a collision, Daniel closes in on the goal that has propelled him through the centuries: to win Lucy’s love and make her remember him.
But obstacles spring up: Lucy is afraid of the unsettling visions this attractive young man conjures in her, and their murderous enemy — who gives new meaning to the term “body snatcher” — is out to settle an ancient score.
Brashares has fun applying her take on reincarnation to historical and current figures (Proust is now a Kentucky housewife and quite the bridge player), but her real power is revealed in the book’s most poignant scene. It comes not when Lucy slips through Daniel’s desperate grasp yet again but when he visits one of his own graves and thinks about his family from a previous life.
Daniel acknowledges that the many siblings and mothers and fathers who have cycled through his existence are only bit players to him, but as he stares at the freshly cut flowers put on his own grave, his isolation feels raw and palpable.
The book leaves some questions unanswered, and the closing chapters feel a bit rushed. But this is an inventive, romantic, highly pleasurable ride through time that will appeal to older teens, as well as adults.
NONFICTION
Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer), by Stan Cox, $24.95
The air conditioner has transformed our lives. Thanks to it, people migrated south, Las Vegas and Phoenix became thriving desert oases, and retail customers could shop in the summer. The AC’s impact is the topic of “Losing Our Cool,” by Kansas environmental writer Stan Cox.
Despite its gelid glory, Cox suggests, the air conditioner may not be such a good thing. The AC accounts for nearly 20 percent of the electricity used in the average American home. The influx of new residents to Florida has decimated sensitive ecosystems.
Phoenix — a city that could hardly exist without air conditioning — struggles to support the water demands of its 1.5 million people. Children now spend too much time indoors, becoming sedentary and overweight.
Cox writes in simple, direct prose. He spaces out statistics with anecdotes and fun facts, making a potentially boring subject interesting. He only aggregates information, however, offering no original reporting.
He suggests alternatives to air conditioning, including limiting house sizes and planting vegetation on roofs and near windows to create barriers against the sun. Or people can simply go outside, adjust to the heat and humidity and meld with the environment. “We can become more resilient human beings,” Cox writes.
