crothe77 's review for:

These Memories Do Not Belong to Us by Yiming Ma
informative medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
 
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy

These Memories Do Not Belong to Us by Yiming Ma is a mixed first and third person multi-POV speculative novel exploring what could happen if China, now called Qin, conquered America and if memories could be inherited. When our unnamed protagonist’s mother passes away, he inherits her MindBank, which contains memories from before, during, and after Qin became the lone global superpower. Knowing that the Party could come for him, he shares these memories with the world instead of keeping them to himself.

As the world goes deeper into censorship and fascism rises up once again, this feels extremely timely. It is in the interest of governments who seek to control the population to obscure facts and distort our collective memories. We see this in the US with photos of the Civil Rights era consistently being shown in black and white despite the fact that we have color photos of many of those same moments so that they will feel further back in time than they actually are. Sometimes our individual memories are the only proof we have of the truth and the idea that a government can distort even that is horrifying but not too far from current reality.

There are multiple POV characters and the reader is expected to figure out for themselves how the different POVs are connected if they are at all. Some of them are snapshots of moments within the history of Qin and others are linked together more clearly. Because so many of them are in first person, it can take a moment to realize that the POV character has changed between chapters, but it becomes apparent fairly quickly. 

The most interesting detail was the Chrysanthemum Virus, a disease in Qin’s history that led to the government putting multiple small towns under quarantine in an effort to keep it from spreading. The virus results in flowers bursting from the body of carriers of the disease until it eventually kills them and development towards a cure was not very high on the government’s list. 

I would recommend this to fans of speculative fiction and dystopia and readers and of experimental styles of fiction