How to be Remembered

Michael Thompson

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, March 25th 2023

For all intents and purposes, Tommy Palmer is a perfectly normal little boy. Until the eve of his 1st birthday, when all trace of him is wiped from the Universe.

Thus begins a pattern that will define his life: every January 5th, he awakens to find everything gone. With neither possessions nor records, no institutional or individual memory of his existence,  Tommy must rebuild his world from scratch, justifying his presence in places he has lived in for years and introducing himself anew to people to whom the day before he was well-known. He eventually identifies loopholes allowing him to take some possessions with him and leave anonymous shadows of his presence behind, but keeping the woman he loves will require a workaround of a far grander scale.

The ambitious premise of How To Be Remembered is cleverly and successfully executed, provided you can suspend disbelief long enough for Tommy to reach an age where he is old enough to understand what is happening at an intellectual level. But my heart bleeds for the confused little boy who regularly finds himself a stranger to the people he cares for most. It is a parent’s worst nightmare made flesh.