Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them – Bob Dylan

What would you do if every 60 minutes or so, your memory erased itself and all you could remember were snatches of your earliest childhood? Through the eyes of Emily Barr’s Flora Banks, you can live that experience, where the same things happen over and over again, and you rely on those around you to keep you moving a little bit forward instead of forever going back to the beginning.

The titular One Memory of Flora is that she kisses Drake. On a beach. You’ll read this a lot. Drake is her best friend Paige’s ex boyfriend, who is leaving town to study in Svalbard. When Paige learns about the kiss, she cuts off her friendship with Flora. But the timing is terrible as Flora’s parents have to leave town to visit Flora’s older brother who is gravely ill in Paris, thinking that Paige will look after Flora. Flora finds herself having to look after herself, as Paige won’t forgive her. Keeping up the pretence that she and Paige are having a good time together, Flora finds ways of reminding herself who she is and what she needs to do to get through the week without her parents, to keep herself safe and to remember to take her medicine, all the time clinging to her One Memory. She kissed Drake. On a beach.

Ever resourceful, Flora decides to go to Svalbard to find Drake, and hopefully restore her memory. Reading about her journey was like watching through my fingers, expecting Flora to have mishap after mishap. The awkwardness and uncomfortableness of Flora in unfamiliar territory, and the quiet safety net put up by those who meet her and immediately see her vulnerability is well portrayed, the often unwritten but tangible part of the tale.

This is an incredible love story. But not the one that you expect from the first couple of chapters. I felt the frustration of Flora followed by the fear and confusion that comes when her friable memories disintegrate once again. You find yourself rooting for Flora and hoping that from the One Memory, more memories follow on.

“There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins. They’re ugly, but those are the facts of life.” Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird

If you don’t go in to book stores to buy your books, you don’t get to chat to the people who work there, invariably book lovers themselves. While treating my niece and nephew to a couple of new books in the children’s section in Waterstones, I confessed to the girls on the till that I had a bit of a thing for teenage fiction myself. They immediately pointed me in to the direction of The Hate U Give and were so effusive about it, that I was not able to leave the shop without bringing it with me. Do believe the hype. This is such a powerful read.

From the start this book is punchy, confronting the reader with the unwarranted shooting of a child. The misfortune of crossing the path of a prejudiced and paranoid police officer while being black and male. Starr is in the passenger seat when her friend Khalil, gets pulled over by the officer for no apparent reason. Moments later, she is cradling him as he slips away, multiple bullets in his back from the gun of white officer.

The Hate U Give makes plain how it feels to be fearful of being just who you are in case that puts you in a stereotyped box, paints you with only the negative traits associated with that stereotype and denies you justice because guilt becomes presumed unless innocence can be proven, though if the bullet is already out of the gun you have already been tried, judged and sentenced, with no chance of appeal.

Starr takes us through her grief for her friend, her guilt that she couldn’t have saved him, not just in that car but in the months leading up to the moment, how treacherous she feels to be with a boyfriend whose skin is the same colour as the man who murdered Khalil, and her discovery of the power of a voice that is brave enough to make itself heard.