The Memory Collectors

I've been meaning to read this book nearly since it came out, as speculative fiction with a focus on memory seemed right up my alley. And, in the end, I'm so glad I did.

It's possible my instincts put off my reading it because, in truth, this was a far more emotional read than I expected, and hit close to home in too many respects. As such, it wasn't an easy read for me, but as I absolutely adored it. I'd call it something of a Velveteen Rabbit for adults--and I say that lovingly--but with the requisite touches of horror, fantasy, and loss that one might expect from such a description. Neville's style and storytelling are wonderful in every way, though, and I'd absolutely recommend this book to anyone interested.

The premise of this book completely hooked me in. Ev has an ability to feel the emotions attached to objects. She uses this gift - or is it a curse? - to find objects infused with positive emotions, and sells them at the Chinatown Night Market in Vancouver. Ev refers to objects like these as being stained, and she knows that people can react to a variety of emotions contained in stained items. Objects stained with love and nurturing emotions give off a positive feeling, while objects imbued with negative emotions like jealousy, despair or hate can have a detrimental impact on those owning, or even holding the object.

Harriet is a hoarder and has been collecting treasures her whole life. She collects items made bright by the emotions of show more previous owners, and the sheer volume of her collection has been making other residents in her building feel sick with headaches and other maladies. As an aside, if you've ever wondered what it might be like to navigate through a hoarder's house, you're going to find out here.

Bright and stained objects can be anything that has been infused with intense emotion from the previous owner, a baby blanket, a scarf, a jar of buttons, sewing scissors, a gun or even a wooden spoon.

Harriet dreams of creating a carefully curated museum of memories, where members of the public can come and view these treasures. She wants to organise them into positive themes like motherly love or childlike joy and invite guests to seek out the section of the museum that feels 'right' to them, and leave the exhibition feeling that their sense of wellbeing has been nourished and their spirit replenished.

Both Ev and Harriet have troubled histories, and Ev's dark past in particular and the relationship with her sister forms the mystery of the book. The Memory Collectors is emotionally charged (pun intended) and I enjoyed learning more about our two protagonists and seeing how they used their gifts and interacted with each other.

Despite the darkness, The Memory Collectors by Kim Neville is ultimately a hopeful and inspirational read and an outstanding debut. Highly recommended.

* Copy courtesy of Simon & Schuster * show less

My home is filled with heirlooms and mementos, each associated with a person or time from my past. Whenever we moved, settling these things into the house transformed it into a home.

Some of these things make me a little sad, but most make me happy. I have good memories of the student lamp from Great-Grandma's house, the 1842 ogee clock we bought at our first auction, the cracked glass miniature vases Mom set on her knick-knack self, the fourth generation back heirloom Blue Flow soup bowls, the embroidery mom made for me, the Japan figures gifted to my husband on his birth.

Very few people look at these things and feel the things I feel when I see them.

But...what if the emotions people feel could attach to their things and could be show more sensed by others? What if these emotions could change those who encounter the objects? What if some people could sense this emotional baggage and use it for harm or health?

Kim Neville's debut novel The Memory Collectors imagines people with the special ability to sense the emotions that cling to things.

Ev tries to control it, suppressing the effects of the 'stains' on things. She saw how her father fell victim to dark stains. She was unable to save her parents from the evil that overtook him. She has tried to protect her younger sister, Noemi, who flits in and out of her life.

Harriet has hoarded these stained things. They are overwhelming her and affecting her neighbors, too. Perhaps she could make a museum filled with good feelings, a place of healing? When she mets Ev, she knows she has found the person who can help her.

We can hide from the past, suppress it, reject it. We can become enslaved to the past so it inhibits our growth. We can shape the past into works of art. And we can rise above the past to become changed and whole people

The Memory Collectors is a fantastic story that uses fantasy to explore our common human struggle with the past and the lingering emotions that inhibit our growth.

I received a free ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. show less

One Sentence Summary: Ev can feel the emotions people leave behind on objects, and so can Harriet, but the women differ on how they view their gift while the dangerous past of a third with the same gift looms over them.

Immediately after reading the book description, I knew I had to read this one. It reminded me of Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, my favorite magical realism read, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, which I enjoyed more in theory than in actuality. I loved the idea of objects holding the emotions and memories of their former owner and was intrigued by the dark past of the third person with the same gift as Ev and Harriet. The Memory Collectors turned out to really deliver on the magical realism show more and I really enjoyed the focus on family and the effects of the same gift on different people. It also shed a new light on hoarding that I found really interesting.



The Plot: A Story of Gifts and Family
When they were very young, Ev and her younger sister Noemi’s parents died. But their father had a special gift that allowed him to feel emotions from objects, a gift he passed down to Ev. As an adult, Ev thinks of the emotions as stains, as something to be either used for her own gain or be destroyed. She holds her gift at a distance and does everything in her power to keep herself sanitized from them.

Harriet, much older than Ev, is a hoarder, but only keeps the objects with a brightness, an emotion left behind by its owner powerful enough to call to her. She can’t bear to give up her bright objects, but it’s affecting her neighbors.

It’s sheer coincidence that Ev and Harriet meet, that they discover they have the same gift. Harriet is desperate to teach her, to make her love the bright objects as much as she does. But Ev sees them as stains and Harriet’s massive collection as terrifying. Noemi also has her own suspicions about Harriet, her own secrets, as it turns out the three women are more connected than they thought and need each other to keep them from spiraling down the dark path a third person with Ev and Harriet’s gift took years before.

The Memory Collectors surprised me by how intense it was. Focused on emotions and memories, I thought it might be a bit dreamy, a bit magical, with a bit of an edge. Something pretty like Garden Spells. But I was so wrong. This story sucked me in, made me switch sides between Ev, Harriet, and Noemi the entire time.

Told by Ev and Harriet, I loved how it took the same gift and took it down different roads with the two women. It created a clash of wills and a whole host of secrets that helped make this a compelling read. There’s so much tension, but also so many lighter moments. I loved watching the characters come to love and suspect each other for various things throughout the story. They became an odd family of sorts, and not without their own squabbles and side taking.

But my favorite part was just in how it all unraveled. It was all so well-timed, so perfect, but never contrived. Every moment of the story builds up to something else. I could have done without the back and forth in time from before and after Ev and Noemi’s parents died and the darkness shrouding the third person with the gift felt a little weak, but it all did come together by the end. Every bit lent a little more meaning, a little more depth, so I left the story quite satisfied.

The Memory Collectors is also a story of family and sisterhood as much as it is about objects holding emotions and memories. There’s a push and pull between Ev and Noemi, a wall of secrets between them. Ev wants to be the consummate big sister, but Noemi is determined to do things her own way. Their family is wrapped tight to the plot of this book with Ev and Noemi at the center. The gift divides them almost as much as it divides Ev and Harriet, but the resolution to each turns out to be quite different from the other, and completely natural. I loved that everything happened so naturally, that the characters drove the story, that it was one step back and two steps forward the whole way through.



The Characters: A Kind of Dysfunctional Family
While Ev and Harriet are the narrators of The Memory Collectors, Noemi and Owen, an older friend of Ev’s, have large roles as well. They created something of an artificial family, but their ties are more tenuous and their relationships hampered and shadowed by secrets.

Ev is really into keeping her life sanitary. She’s almost obsessed with it, and tries desperately to shake her family past off. She’s doing the best she can to cope with life and the gift it has dealt her, but I think she’s also really curious about what else she could do with it, what she could be capable of, and suspicious of how Harriet handles their gift. Her need to understand, to make a living, and to protect her sister really push the story forward, so I found her to be the most interesting character. The only thing I was puzzled by was her being half Chinese. I didn’t ever get the sense that she was even part Asian and it only seemed like a useful thing to the telling of the story than something integral or defining to Ev herself.

But Harriet is quite a character herself. The gift runs in her family, so she inherited her mother’s collection and continually adds to her own. I loved how she thought of objects as being bright instead of stains, adding a light color to the whole story. Harriet is absolutely a hoarder and I loved how the author and the story handled the issue through her. I couldn’t help but view hoarding in a completely different way while reading this book, and I loved Harriet’s struggles. I could feel them so well, her attachment to her bright objects, but she also isn’t a fool, so her story read something like therapy sessions.

Noemi and Owen also added new angles to the story. As characters without the gift but who are closely tied to Ev and Harriet, they view the objects in a very different light. They view Ev and Harriet differently. Noemi felt like a loose cannon, but she kept things interesting. Owen was more of a solid rock, but even he was a little shaky. I did really enjoy his relationship with Harriet, though, and he added a bit of softness and love and acceptance into the mix.



The Setting: Vancouver, Canada
The Memory Collectors is set on the Western side of Canada in Vancouver. I don’t know much about the area, but didn’t get much of a Canadian feel. It felt like it could have been any city near the ocean, though the book did mention other nearby places to help place it on the map.

Clearly, this book is set in a large city. It gives a great sense of there being lots of buildings, lots of people and traffic, and various parts of the city different from each other. The Chinatown market felt busy and full of haggling. The area Harriet grew up in felt stately and old. The alleys were prevalent as Ev and Owen spent a lot of time dumpster diving. There were plenty of places for all of them to run to and hide out.



Overall: Surprisingly Intense
The Memory Collectors impressed me with how it so deftly wove magical realism in. It felt like I was reading a fiction novel, but the magic was most definitely there. It was a nice balance and I really enjoyed all the tension, family drama, and secrets that were thrown in. Ev and Noemi’s ancestry threw me a bit, but I think that was the only thing that really bothered me. The end felt a little drawn out as well, but, then again, I really couldn’t stop reading it. This is the kind of story that dug its claws in and held on. I was fascinated and really, really wanted to know how it all turned out, how the gift would ultimately affect them all. Overall, a surprisingly intense read, but one I had a hard time putting down.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for a review copy. All opinions expressed are my own. show less

Many of us have seemingly worthless objects we treasure because they hold memories of their owners. A father’s hat, a mother’s ring, a child’s old shoe, we connect with them emotionally. In The Memory Collectors, Kim Neville takes this idea of objects holding memory and emotion and turns up the dial. Evelyn (Ev) is a young woman who can sense the emotions that are attached to objects, but unlike you and me, she senses these stains, as she calls them, in other people’s objects and even their trash. That’s how she makes a living, finding objects with stains and selling them at a flea market.

She meets another person who senses objects, but unlike Ev, Harriet collects these objects. She calls them bright things and show more indiscriminately gathers them all. To all intents and purposes, she is a hoarder, her apartment a maelstrom of emotion that makes Ev dizzy. Ev fears the stains while Harriet collects them. Harriet suggests they can help each other. She can teach Ev how not to be overwhelmed by the object’s emotions and Ev can help Harriet sort the objects by their emotional content to create a museum of emotions that could help people.

Harriet and Ev, with the help of their now mutual friend Owen, set to work but they all three are hiding secrets. They may have been able to rub along fairly well, eventually coming to trust each other and share their painful secrets, but Ev’s younger sister Noemi crashes into their world like a runaway train.

I loved The Memory Collectors. Ev was a realistic heroine, despite her paranormal ability to understand objects. So much of the story is about her need to understand her ability and to face her past. Harriet, too, had to face her past and understand her need to collect. Ev’s sister Noemi was satisfyingly complex even though she appeared shallow and materialistic at times. There is an analogy in the story of standing with one foot in two boats, the past and the future, and falling in the water in the present. This is a story where more than one person has to pick a boat. Along the way is a masterful story with characters you will come to love.

The Memory Collectors will be released on March 16th. I received an ARC from the publisher through Shelf Awareness.

The Memory Collectors at Atria Books | Simon and Schuster
Kim Neville author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2021/02/26/9781982157586/ show less

I was drawn to this book first by its lovely cover, the comparisons to The Keeper of Lost Things, The Coincidence of Coconut Cake, and Practical Magic (ALL of which I loved) and by the synopsis. I love magical realism, and this was a fresh take on the idea of emotions attaching to objects. The Memory Collectors is a bit sadder and darker than The Keeper of Lost Things. It’s a story about our connections to things (and the emotions they hold), letting go of the hold that our past has on us, and healing the emotional wounds that we carry with us.

The Memory Collectors is the story of two women with the same gift (or curse, depending on who you ask) of feeling the emotions that people leave on objects. The story opens with a flashback to show more when our main character Ev is a child. It’s a sweet scene of a happy childhood memory revolving around a balsa wood glider. Discarded after it is accidentally broken by her little sister, it is later found in a box of other objects by Harriet, who is a collector (and protector) of things found.

The story unfolds slowly at first, and is interspersed with chapters showing flashbacks of Ev and Noemi’s childhood. The writing is evocative and a bit moody, complementing the pacing. It’s a bit quirky and whimsical and sad at the same time, and the last third of the book take a turn that is dark and unexpected.
This is a book about people who have all endured some kind of personal trauma and how they heal, and how they learn to let go of the past. As such, they are all pretty deeply flawed, and that makes them interesting and unpredictable. In an interesting twist for books in this genre, Ev initially doesn’t view her “gift” as a good thing and takes drastic measures to protect herself. She’s prickly, defensive, and unlikable at times, but she slowly won me over.


I honestly wanted to see more of Owen’s character. I think there is a lot beneath the surface, and while the story hints at why he is so attached to Ev, I would have loved to learn a little more about him.

The other thing I really wanted more of was a little bit more backstory on Harriet’s house. There was something else hinted at when the story got really dark but I was too focused on Ev and Noemi at that point in time. Fine – I really wanted a little more backstory on all the characters and how they related to Ev.


The Memory Collectors was a thought provoking novel about the weight of the emotions carried in both our past and the objects we bring with us, and about letting go. It’s a wonderful read for those who enjoy magical realism and don’t mind a bit of a dark, dramatic, (and somewhat unsettling) turn near the end. It’s a bit of a mix of emotions – not unlike the ones found in the objects Ev and Harriet hold.

Thanks to Atria for providing me a copy of the book for review purposes. show less

I know this is a serious niche, but I LOVE books about people who can feel energy or emotion from inanimate objects. Can you believe they are a bit hard to to find? :) But that's exactly what this book is about and I am so pleased to have read it.

In this book the author includes the highs and very lows of this gift. The book has some quite dark subject matter and it is conveyed with such beautiful heartache I think you would be hard pressed to not feel it yourself. And the ending. I just loved it. I could see Harriet's final scene like it was happening in front of me and I will think of her as I come across lost treasures. But maybe most appealing to me was the story of strangers becoming family. That is one of my favorite tropes.

If you show more like magical realism and stories with deep emotion you will most likely enjoy this book as much as I did.

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book. show less