Review: (Don’t You) Forget About Me by Kate Karyus Quinn

Synopsis from Good Reads:

Welcome to Gardnerville.

A place where no one gets sick. And no one ever dies.

Except…

There’s a price to pay for paradise. Every fourth year, the strange power that fuels the town exacts its payment by infecting teens with deadly urges. In a normal year in Gardnerville, teens might stop talking to their best friends. In a fourth year, they’d kill them.

Four years ago, Skylar’s sister, Piper, was locked away after leading sixteen of her classmates to a watery grave. Since then, Skylar has lived in a numb haze, struggling to forget her past and dull the pain of losing her sister. But the secrets and memories Piper left behind keep taunting Skylar—whispering that the only way to get her sister back is to stop Gardnerville’s murderous cycle once and for all.

After reading the description I was expecting this book to be about a picture perfect town with a bunch of psychotic kids running around trying to kill everyone every leap year. That isn’t completely off, but still pretty far off. Gardnerville is a secluded, magical town where people who had diseases like cancer can come to live in and be cancer-free. Residents regularly live well over a century. However, everyone knows there’s something off about the town. And that every fourth year dangerous/supernatural things happen to some of the kids. When one of these kids do something sinister, they are sent to the reformatory where they are held for various lengths of time. Skylar’s sister, Piper, was one of these kids and has been gone for four years. Skylar starts to worry that the fourth year madness is catching up to her as she tries to remember what Piper’s plan was.

The story is told from Skylar’s POV with chapters alternating between the present and flashbacks. The present chapters are told from Skylar’s 1st person POV and the flashback chapters are kind of a 2nd person POV, where Skylar is “talking” to Piper about what’s happened in the past. I love multiple timeline story telling, so it totally worked for me, though I recognize it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I felt the flashbacks were used well, both in developing the characters of Skylar and Piper and revealing the twists and turns of the story.

I just don’t feel there’s a lot I can say about this book without giving away lots of spoilers. I will say that it’s a very unique book. Though the book isn’t particularly long, it’s not an easy read and it took me about 4 days to finish it (I can usually knock a book of similar length out in about half the time). Don’t let that put you off, though, as it was definitely worth the read. At times I guessed where the story was going, but then there would still be one more twist I didn’t see coming.

Overall, I really enjoyed (Don’t You) Forget About Me. I liked it way more than the previous book I read by this author and look forward to what she comes up with next.

Rating (out of 5):
Plot: 4
Characters: 4
Readability: 4
Enjoyability: 4
Overall Rating: 4 stars