a remarkably bad book

I really, really wanted to like My Name is Memory.  Mostly because it was written by Ann Brashares, who wrote the Traveling Pants series, which I loved, despite being at least ten years too old for it.  I read her first adult novel, The Last Summer (of You and Me) and thought it was fairly good, particularly in the setup, although the last third was anticlimactic.  I was excited to see My Name is Memory shelved in the Science Fiction category, where I assumed it was languishing because despite its fantastical premise (a character who can remember all his past lives) it's mostly a coming of age and a romance novel.

I had really high hopes, and at first they seemed warranted.  The the man who remembers his past lives is well-drawn, and I enjoyed his narration of his very long story.  The nominal main character, Lucy, with whom he has been in love for fifteen hundred years (I'm not giving anything away here) is far less interesting.  And as the novel wears on - it's 324 pages and doesn't feel one word shorter - her uninterestingness becomes more of an issue.  Sometimes I found myself indignant on her behalf; it wasn't her fault she was boring; the problem was the that author clearly just didn't care about her.

The last third of the novel was where it really fell apart.  As in so many romantic movies, the premise of the story is that these two people belong together, but the two characters spend so little time together that there's no reason for us, or even them, to really believe that.  In a romantic comedy, where the only thing a stake is another, more-annoying, guy or who to kiss at midnight, that's forgivable, but in such a serious novel with such weighty pretensions, you're left with two kids who have a crush, plus some mumbo-jumbo about an unfulfilled crush a hundred lifetimes ago. As they start to make serious, life-or-death decisions based on their grand, centuries-spanning, nonexistent love affair - and as their total unfamiliarity to each other aside from annoying gender stereotypes becomes grindingly obvious - it becomes hard, as a reader, to get on board with the frantic gyrations of the tail end of the plot.

Finally and bizarrely, the novel ends just as it starts to get really interesting.  Throughout the book there are hints at other things going on in the world of the novel, things about reincarnation even the narrator doesn't understand.  There are two characters who remember their past lives, but differently; there are a few characters who recur between lives.  At the end of the book, it seems like the characters might be moving into a space where some of this cool stuff would be elucidated - but then, of course, the book ends, and nothing more interesting happens than <SPOILER ALERT> an unanticipated yet totally welcome pregnancy, and a promising young woman throwing away her life to wait around endlessly for a man.  I feel like I could have found that same not-actually-happy ending, with a lot less of the pretension to depth, two aisles over in the bodice-ripper section of the library.