The Memory Box

Publisher and industry reviews

UK Kirkus review

There is an intriguing plot to this novel. Catherine lost her biological mother at the age of six months and all her life has treated her father's second wife as her real mother, triumphantly preferring her ordinariness to her mother's beauty and talents, and taking a perverse satisfaction from people's inability to see any resemblance between mother and daughter. As she is clearing out the parental attic after the death of her stepmother, however, Catherine finds a box which she remembers refusing to open when it was presented to her at 21. There is no letter inside, only a few objects: feathers of a common gull, an emerald necklace, a book of addresses with no names. After 31 years spent asserting her indifference to her mother's memory, Catherine begins to pursue the significance of these clues obsessively. As Forster cleverly leads her spoilt - and frequently curmudgeonly - heroine towards understanding her mother's puzzle, the mystery becomes a metaphor both for the terrors concealed under Catherine's childish rejection and the relation between genetics and upbringing. Review by ELAINE FEINSTEIN Editor's note: Elaine Feinstein is the author of Dreamers. (Kirkus UK)

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