cass_lit 's review for:

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

3.5

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The Memory Police is such an interesting piece of fiction, especially if you consider its original publication in 1994. I think reading it in 2025 adds so much modern context to these disappearances, especially when it came to the novels disappearing. Ultimately I wanted more from the ending and more depth to the characters — while still intriguing, all this book was, in my opinion, was us being told that this happened on an island. We still don’t know why, or how anyone but R *really* felt about it, or what happened to our narrator’s mom, or why we had no contact with people outside the island, etc. I think I just wanted more critical commentary.