Epeolatry Book Review: Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

I’ll have to go off on a bit of a tangent with the opening of this review. As I get older, memory, and the act of remembering takes odd twists and turns. You know those suncatchers that twist and turn and throw rainbows around the room, and yet sometimes they just have one steady beam of color on the wall that stays there all afternoon? And you sit there looking at that one beam of color while you think and remember and you might even slip off into a daydream of a world where you’re on an ocean liner or sipping a fruity drink under a beach umbrella and then you ever so slowly come back to your painfully monotone existence? The surreal part is that I wonder where that person went—that adventurer that lived for chaos and change and new scenery to explore—and I cannot believe that a handful of years have passed, years where nothing much of note has happened, and certainly not anything to put in the memory book. Right now, I more than want to forget recent events and to remember the adventures.

So, that’s all gloom-and-doom (once a melancholy goth, always one, maybe) but it’s exactly why I enjoyed Waite’s Murder by Memory, (and not just because the main character was about my age). I loved the idea of a starship utopia as explored through a literary distance. I liked the fact that this book was evocative of sleepy summers spent reading mysteries at Grandma’s house. I was intrigued about the concept that memories could be stored in books, and I wondered if the memory uploads could be curated by the passengers on the generation ship Fairweather, so they could choose what to remember and what not to remember (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my favourite movies.). I think the addition of the murder mystery element kept these concepts in check (i.e. from being overdone, maudlin, and also too predictable). 

Again, reaching a certain age can feel as surreal as time spent on a longue durée starship, as memory blurs the line between past and present, and time can be condensed into a singular, and oddly haunting, burst of color from a suncatcher that consumes the space of an entire afternoon in the seemingly breadth of a minute.

I’d recommend this novella for all those who need to escape into someone else’s memories for a spell; take the opportunity to plunge into someone else’s reality on a vessel that’s very, very far from Earth and all its current problems. 

/5

Available from Amazon and Bookshop.