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A review by nooralshanti
Remember: Book 2 of The Replacement Series by Bianca Sierra
3.0
Remember is book 2 of the replacement series by Bianca Sierra Luebke. In my review of book 1 I mentioned that the author takes a lot of things I usually hate in fiction and makes me like them. I found the first book to be well-written and intriguing and my only realm qualm with it was the cliffhanger at the end! This book does a good job of explaining the backstory of all the main characters from book 1 and was a solid second book in the series.
At the end of the first book one character is told to remember and this triggers a kind of magical exploration of the memories of all the people around her. Through these memories we get to see the history of the Lymerians on Earth as these characters live thousands of years. We get more insight into their society and their weird rules and the politics behind the divisions. But as with the first book it's more focused on the relationships between the main characters than the political stuff. At first I found this OK, as I wanted to understand the relationships between the characters and what led them to the decisions they made in book 1. But I began to increasingly want to see more of the politics sometime around halfway through. I really wanted Clara to be more rebellious than she was, I really wanted to see Merrick's rebellion more clearly and more deeply. I also found that the relationships got a bit too tangled at some point. Also, I felt that the Astro characters weren't as well-developed and wished for some POV scenes with the main two (Rebecca and Carmen) so that we could understand their world and their motivations better.
The Lymerians, as the book keeps mentioning, are less emotional than humans (though to be honest I suspect this is only because of the constant memory erasing) so it made sense for the narrative to be a little more distant, especially as it was also covering such a huge amount of time. Still, I often wished we would see more emotions, especially in connection with how they felt about the rules, with some characters possibly questioning the rules, with the parent-child relationships, etc. It would have helped me engage with them better and connect with their struggles better if I could feel their emotions more keenly - something I think book 1 did a bit better than this one.
I also found myself feeling a little lost in regard to everyone's motivations when we got back to the timeline from book 1. Suddenly, I wasn't entirely sure why Angelica was quite so angry and I had lost track of who knew what because of the couple of instances of mind-wiping that had happened a hundred or so pages earlier in the story. I think in this sense book 1 worked better because it was more focused on Angelica whereas this one kind of lost that focus with all the history stuff. Maybe if a bit more time was allowed for the characters to have scenes where they tried to remember, but couldn't, or struggled with their lack of memories, or even just hated that they couldn't remember certain things, it would have been great.
Overall, it was a good, solid book 2 that helped explain the history of the Lymerians both in terms of how they spent their two thousand years on Earth, hiding from humans, and also in terms of how the relationships of the main characters developed. And I think I would be interested in reading the rest of the series when it comes out.
At the end of the first book one character is told to remember and this triggers a kind of magical exploration of the memories of all the people around her. Through these memories we get to see the history of the Lymerians on Earth as these characters live thousands of years. We get more insight into their society and their weird rules and the politics behind the divisions. But as with the first book it's more focused on the relationships between the main characters than the political stuff. At first I found this OK, as I wanted to understand the relationships between the characters and what led them to the decisions they made in book 1. But I began to increasingly want to see more of the politics sometime around halfway through. I really wanted Clara to be more rebellious than she was, I really wanted to see Merrick's rebellion more clearly and more deeply. I also found that the relationships got a bit too tangled at some point. Also, I felt that the Astro characters weren't as well-developed and wished for some POV scenes with the main two (Rebecca and Carmen) so that we could understand their world and their motivations better.
The Lymerians, as the book keeps mentioning, are less emotional than humans (though to be honest I suspect this is only because of the constant memory erasing) so it made sense for the narrative to be a little more distant, especially as it was also covering such a huge amount of time. Still, I often wished we would see more emotions, especially in connection with how they felt about the rules, with some characters possibly questioning the rules, with the parent-child relationships, etc. It would have helped me engage with them better and connect with their struggles better if I could feel their emotions more keenly - something I think book 1 did a bit better than this one.
I also found myself feeling a little lost in regard to everyone's motivations when we got back to the timeline from book 1. Suddenly, I wasn't entirely sure why Angelica was quite so angry and I had lost track of who knew what because of the couple of instances of mind-wiping that had happened a hundred or so pages earlier in the story. I think in this sense book 1 worked better because it was more focused on Angelica whereas this one kind of lost that focus with all the history stuff. Maybe if a bit more time was allowed for the characters to have scenes where they tried to remember, but couldn't, or struggled with their lack of memories, or even just hated that they couldn't remember certain things, it would have been great.
Overall, it was a good, solid book 2 that helped explain the history of the Lymerians both in terms of how they spent their two thousand years on Earth, hiding from humans, and also in terms of how the relationships of the main characters developed. And I think I would be interested in reading the rest of the series when it comes out.