The Memory Prisoner

A traumatic childhood experience that culminated with her grandfather's mysterious disappearance and presumed death has made 15-year-old Maddie Palmer a prisoner of her house. Unable to leave her domicile, Maddie, "a towering mountain of a girl" with "a big boulder of a face" has spent the last 13 years indoors. Her window on the world is her younger brother Keith, who nightly gives her a blow-by-blow account of everything that he has seen, heard, and read since he left the house that morning. Both of their lives change forever when Keith is selected to be an apprentice in the gloomy Tower Library, run by the powerful and wily Mr. Lexeter. The things Keith, who Maddie calls "Eyes and Ears," tells her about Mr. Lexeter and the Tower Library begin to erode the banks of Maddie's repressed memory, and she commences an investigation into the sinister and Kafka-esque institution. Once Maddie begins to regain her memory, leaves her house, and instigates a battle with the evil Mr. Lexeter, the story changes focus, losing the otherworldly dreamlike quality that sustained it. What was mysterious and surreal in the world of Maddie's mind becomes both harder to swallow and less compelling in the context of the still nightmarishly bizarre but now more grounded action-adventure story. Still, newcomer Bloor's ideas are strong and his descriptive powers—which are so sharp that the reader can practically see, hear, and smell the contours of his imaginary world—keeps the material lively and thought-provoking throughout. (Fiction. 10-14)