Book Review: Forest of Memory by Mary Robinette Kowal (Four Stars)
“If I hadn’t, if I had biked on through, would I have known that this was a cusp point in my life? Probably not. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how many other cusp points you sail through in life without any awareness.”
Outstanding novelette of a not-too-distant future. Excellent storytelling. Kowal weaves an increasingly tight web of mystery and suspense drawing the reader into her logical but unsettling climax. Love the cover art.
“Have you tried to do this? Have you turned off your Lens, turned off your i-Sys, stepped away from the cloud, and just tried to REMEMBER something? It’s hard, and the memories are mutable.”
The intentional typos take some getting used to but if I were forced to compose on a manual typewriter the results would be even more incomprehensible.
“I’d actually been asleep for nearly a day and a half. It was, indeed, lucky I hadn’t been killed when he shot me.”
Quibbles: 1. She has about the same body mass as a deer. The tranquilizer would not knock her out ten times longer, let alone risk killing her. 2.She knows how fast her electric bike goes and she was cut off for twenty minutes; she can figure the coverage of the disabling field. And, since he was stalling the deer as she approached, her i-Sys should have cut out long before she approached the deer.
“The lid cracked, and I remember being relieved that it was a sealed bottle, because that meant he wasn’t trying to poison me. As if there weren’t easier ways to do me in. Trust me, once you start having paranoid thoughts, everything becomes suspicious.”
As a Matter of Fancy 
You had me checking the web for deer masses – which vary widely.
Readers like you – who actually care – are why I am VERY careful about numbers, distances, times, dates. Most won’t notice, or won’t bother to check the math. But, oh! the few who do – those are the readers I want.