The Sudden Appearance of Hope - Drunk Blogging

 The Sudden Appearance of Hope is by Claire North, who wrote The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.

At this point I think I need to say that I technically got this at an ARC copy at BookCon this year, (which was awesome, I highly suggest going).  But this book came out, I think, in late May 2016.  This is an honest and unsolicited review.

But I loved this book even if I don't think I'm quite smart enough for it.
Hope is forgotten by everyone.  She is picked up by camera's and electronics, but nobody can remember her, even if they know they'll forget her.  That plot enough would be enough to interest me, but Hope decides to fight against an app called "perfection" which tries to make people "perfect" through a point systems that offers discounts at high end retailers and the like.  She's helped out by someone who goes by Byron and is being chased by someone named Gaugin.

That alone is enough to make me think that I wasn't quite smart enough for this book.  There's a number of references to classic literature and more, that I picked up on but wouldn't have known otherwise.  I read plenty, but it doesn't change the fact that I don't remember philosophers.  A lot of this book was people talking about the nature of humanity and whether or not someone was a person if they didn't have a past outside of what they rememberred as there was no culutureal reason for morality... Basically there was a lot going on here.

That being said, Hope changes a lot over the course of the book.  At the beginning she's a theif, becuase who better to rob someone than someone who can't be remembered.  She can actually grab something away from someone and they won't remember a minute later.  Which is kind of awesome.  Throughout the book she'll be having conversations with people and the next day she'll have the same conversation, which is one of the best ways to track tHope's changes.  She has the same conversation, but each conversation is slightly different.  It's amazing how sublte the changes are.  Seriously, this book was deeper than I am.

I think I'm going to manage not to need to put a spoiler warning in this.  Excpet now that I say that I mgiht need to.  the end of this book was wonderfully open-ended, not that the plot wasn't completely wrapped up, but that there were a  number of characters wehre I wanted to know what happened.  And fuck it. There's a police officer who has been following her for a really long time, since she was young and inexperienced with thieving. As time goes on, she develops a one-sided relationship with him.

At the end of the book, he's there for the climax, but he is sent home. After years of one-off nights/dates and other things, it seemed a little strange that the character would be written off in such a normal way. He just goes on with his life, not remembering Hope outside of knowing he was hunting someone for a number of years. In a way it fits, because Hope's entire existence is existing where no one remembers her, but he seemed so important so it was a little difficult to know that he wasn't important in the end.

This gets 4.5 shots out of 5. The only reason this didn't get 5 shots is that I have a personal grudge against the one thing under the spoiler cut. Othersie, I frigging loved this book. I might think I wasn't smart enough to get everything in it, but the writing was great, I loved the consistent characterization and how Hope grew as a character, and ... well I lost my train of thought. AS for what kind of alcohol to drink with this I think technically anything would work, you just have to drink enough not to remember what you read! So, probably tequila.