The Memory Jar Paperback – April 8, 2016

Taylor is seventeen and in high school, with the perfect college boyfriend, and a future waiting ahead of her - marriage, a baby, maybe studies.Except none of this is what Taylor wants, and she feels powerless to move away from what she has to what she truly desires for herself.The story starts after a snowmobile crash that has left her injured, and her boyfriend Scott in a coma. She's pregnant. Scott proposed to her, and all she wanted to do was break up with him. She's in a hospital with the comatose body of some she might have loved once, a secret ring in her pocket, and a mountain of guilt.How did the accident happen - Scott was always so careful. And what is she going to do about this pregnancy? As far as Taylor can see, her future is over, and the world is closing in around her, crushing out everything she wanted for herself. She dreamed of becoming a cardiologist and poet, not a seventeen-year-old single parent, or married to someone she's ultimately not connected to "because of the baby."Taylor's therapist has her start a memory jar, where she fills in the scraps she can remember from her time with Scott, and from the black hole that is the accident. More things come to complicate her already messed-up life - stories about her at school, strange antiabortion texts filled with gruesome images from a private number, a mysterious college "girlfriend' called Kendall whom Scott had never mentioned. And there's Joey, Scott's younger brother, who seem to know all her secrets and believes that Scott didn't deserve her.The narrative voice is painfully authentic - Taylor veers from empathetic to selfish to scared to depressed to hopeful. She's a girl just discovering what it is she wants from her life and the world, trapped and guilty in a relationship she is no longer sure she wants, a baby that seems an echo of herself (she feels that her birth ruined her mother's life and dreams), and facing a myriad futures none of which are remotely close to the one she would choose for herself.Ultimately The Memory Jar is a book about a teenage girl trying to claim power over her own life and body - tired of having her world directed by the needs and decisions of her boyfriend, her mother, her circumstances. It's about learning to face guilt and truth, about female friendships, and the sickening, terrifying powerlessness that many modern teenage girls face over their themselves as they are manipulated by those around them - subtly, obviously, carelessly. There are some gloriously poignant moments where Taylor figures things out for herself, and writing that is deceptive in its clean and simple poetry.

Loved this book. Powerful and moving.

It's a really good book with great characters and interesting story. The part about getting so cold was totally believable, good writing. Made me cry

Not my kind of book

Original review @ 125Pages.comThe Memory Jar is a book about secrets. Secrets that could potentially ruin the life of the seventeen-year-old narrator. It is told in a non-linear format, jumping between the past and the present as the narrator tries to piece together what happened to her and her boyfriend. Taylor and Scott are the picture perfect teen couple. Then an accident on a snowmobile changes everything. Scott is in a coma and Taylor cannot remember the entire events of the day. She knows she is pregnant and now has an engagement ring; but she is not sure if she is happy about either.The plot of The Memory Jar had a lot of potential – teen pregnancy, a terrible accident, a coma boyfriend and more. However it tried to throw in too many other elements such as a weird girl and mysterious text messages. The writing seemed chopped up at times, as the sentences and chapters were very short. It seemed to hamper the plot as it did not flow well. The pacing was very good, it encompassed a few days well and I did enjoy the non-linear story telling. Elissa Janine Hoole can really build a world. Full of sensory touches, I could feel the cold and the vibrations of the snowmobile. The emotions were a little flat to me. Taylor skipped around so much with what she wanted and how she felt that there was no real cohesion to the emotional arc. The characters varied wildly. I really liked Scott’s little brother, as he was a great connector of tidbits of emotions and people. Taylor was so all over the place it was hard to connect with her. The mothers were fine but added little to the story, and the addition of a college friend of Scott’s was just not a good match. She did not seem to fit the rest of the story and seemed to be there just to add one more plot twist that was not needed.The Memory Jar had potential, it just fell a little flat to me. In areas that could have had a great deal of tension, there was none, and other areas had too much trying to happen at once. Elissa Janine Hoole can create a very real world and that helped me enjoy a plot that seemed thrown together at times. With short chapters, multiple narrators and the non-linear timeline, The Memory Jar attempted to mix too many writing devices together to create tension and instead it created a mishmash of ideas. Now, The Memory Jar was not a bad book, it just could have been much better with some more focus.I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Thank you to NetGalley and Flux for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.I wasn’t expecting much going into this novel. I didn’t know much about it when I received it and I’m glad. It helps me to go into the novel with an open mind.Elissa Janine Hoole’s characters are so raw and real. Throughout the entire novel her characters are struggling with the events that transpire before the start of the novel. The novel is told mostly from the POV of Taylor. She isn’t even out of high school yet and she is pregnant. She is destroyed when she finds out. She thought her life was going to be so much more. To make matters worse her boyfriend (father of the child) is in the hospital in a coma after a terrible snowmobile accident they were both in. The story mostly takes place in the hospital with intermittent flash backs to the accident and a few scenes before.I thought the story was good. I liked that the story was in the POV of Taylor, but I feel that the secondary character POV chapters were not needed. I loved the plot twist that happened about 75-80% into the novel. I liked the Hoole wrote Taylor as a struggling teen who was unsure about everything happening in her life. She doesn’t have anything figured out at all. This was nice compared to other YA novels that make their characters seem like they have everything together no matter what the situation.