The Knowing by Sharon Cameron

After I finished reading The Forgetting a few weeks ago, I decided that I liked it enough to continue on with the series. I downloaded The Knowing onto my Kindle and started reading it right away. This is a pretty rare move for me as I'm generally not that into young adult dystopian series anymore, but for some reason, the first book struck a chord with me. I was into it. So, I got myself  back into the city of Canaan and read on to see what happened next.

**There will be spoilers for The Forgetting in this review**

The Knowing is more of a companion novel to the series than a sequel. It is set 100 years into the future from the events of The Forgetting, and focuses on completely different characters. The narration is split between protagonists. The first, Samara Archiva, is an 18-year-old girl living underground in the city of New Canaan. She is one of the Knowing, an elite group of people living in the community that are incapable of forgetting anything. She can remember everything she's ever experienced from being in her mother's womb to precise pages in books she's read. Being one of the Knowing has significant challenges; without the power of time to blunt the edges of painful memories, Samara experiences her worst moments over and over. Many of the Knowing learn to store their memories deep inside their heads and ignore the bad ones, but Samara has never been particularly good at this skill. She isn't alone in this struggle either; the Knowing that can't control their memories frequently commit suicide to escape the pain. Unlike most, who just accept this as an unfortunate fact of life, Samara has a plan. Through reading forbidden books in the New Canaan archive, she learned about how the Canaan of old experienced the Forgetting, and she makes it her mission to sneak out of the city and bring the ability to forget to her people.

The other protagonist, Beckett Rodriguez, is a crew member on the Centauri III, a spacecraft that's on a mission to discover what happened to the original settlers that Earth sent off into space centuries ago to start a new colony on a different planet. He has dreams of becoming an anthropologist and finding the lost city of Canaan, which lost all communication with Earth when they first landed. The story starts as his ship is arriving after a four year journey through space. He is selected for an early scouting mission with a fellow crew member, and together they set off to try and find evidence of human life. Everything gets off track, however, when Beckett is injured in a fall and runs into Samara. The pull between the pair is strong and instant, and he is driven off his course of scientific inquiry quickly by a desire to help Samara with her mission to forget. As the pair soon discovers, powerful people in New Canaan are determined to stop them from finding out more about the Forgetting, and will use any means necessary to prevent them from bringing any changes to the city.  Together, they must push through the danger and secrets to discover the truth about how memories control the city and to find a way to bring peace to its people.

Much like with The Forgetting, I was instantly drawn into this novel. I liked that fact that it wasn't a direct sequel, and I thought the idea of Earth coming back to the planet to figure out what went wrong centuries before was an interesting idea. The mysteries of New Canaan were remained intriguing, and I was always engaged in the story, waiting to see what would be revealed next. I really like the universe Cameron created in these books and this novel dug into enough new secrets and intricacies of it to keep me happy.

I enjoyed the new protagonists as well and I thought the split perspective was very engaging. Samara is a character has suffered a lot of emotional trauma due to her memories, and I thought Cameron's depiction of the internal struggle between her natural grit/bravery and her emotional issues was well done. It was interesting to ponder the idea of what it might be like if you could remember every single day of your life down to the smallest detail. I suspect that it would be difficult, just as it is in the story. Beckett's heart and intelligence were nice character traits to experience as well, even if he ends up throwing out his training and objectivity to help Samara a little too easily for my taste. It's also worth mentioning that both Samara and Beckett are people of color, which you don't often see in young adult science fiction novels. I appreciated the diversity.

The only slight issues I had with this one were the length and occasionally, the clarity. This novel is around 450 pages, and at times, I felt like the action was slowing to a crawl. It wasn't bad enough to get me overly frustrated with the story, but I do feel like the novel might have benefited from some additional editing. In addition, I was often confused on how the society of New Canaan evolved from the people shown in the first novel. The connections between the two books weren't as clear as they should have been. The action of the story wasn't enough to explain everything that happened in the missing 100 years between the books, so Cameron often resorts to massive info dumps through Samara's memories and books from the archive, which didn't fit into the story as smoothly as they could have. By the end of the novel, things are a bit more clear, but I couldn't help thinking that maybe the 100 year jump was a bit too far. There was a lot of "showing" instead of "telling" here.

Despite those concerns though, I still enjoyed The Knowing. It's definitely not as strong as the first book in the series, but it was still a solid few hours of escape. This is definitely a pair of books that I could recommend to students in the future. Cameron leaves the door open for future sequels here as well, so maybe I'll get the chance to head back into this world in the future. I actually kind of hope to get that chance. These books have me hooked, plain and simple. It's nice when that happens.


Total Books Read in 2018: 24