The Reminder

Reviewed by Lynn Crow for TeensReadToo.com

Daisy has never quite come to terms with her mother's death. Though she's told the kids at school tons of stories about hospitals and chemotherapy, she refuses to discuss it with the therapist she's been seeing. And when she starts hearing her mother's voice, she can't help but hope there's some way her mother's still alive.

What Daisy stumbles on in her search is both stranger and more complicated that she could possibly have imagined. Now she has to figure out how to deal with the secret her father's been hiding, and the secrets she's been holding deep inside herself.

How far will she go to hold on to what seems to be her last real tie to the mother she never wanted to lose?

THE REMINDER captures show more the feelings of loss and mourning perfectly, the gloom that hangs over Daisy's life running through every page. Yet it's far from depressing -- it's a story of survival and hope, about living on and letting go. Readers will sympathize with Daisy's struggle, and follow the mystery eagerly to the final page. The revelation at the end is somewhat abrupt, but looking back, Michaels has done an excellent job of setting it up.

This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at how a modern family deals with the death of one of its members. show less

Daisy mother is dead, so why does she keep hearing her voice? Maybe because her father created a life-like replica of her head and embedded it with artificial intelligence so it sounds like her mother and responds to questions. When Daisy stumbles upon this, at first she is horrified, but slowly grows to almost love it. When her father starts dating someone and tosses the head in the storage room, Daisy fears he's trying to get rid of her mother for good and steals the head.