Title: Remembering Mog
Author: Colby Rodowsky
Genre: YA Realistic Fiction
Number of Pages: 135
Rating: C+
Recommended?: No
I was really on the fence about whether to recommend this or not. It’s not a bad book at all, just a forgettable one, and I don’t particularly think it’s worth digging a copy up on the internet. I decided to read Remembering Mog because I remembered liking another book by this author (Clay, about a kidnapped girl and her autistic brother) when I was younger. As you can probably guess, this is a book about grief and deals with some difficult subjects.
The main character, Annie, is about to graduate from high school and is overwhelmed by memories of her sister Mog, who was murdered right around the time of her own graduation. Annie can’t deal with the fact that she will grow and mature and Mog will never get older, and all the milestones they could have shared together that she missed out on. Annie’s mom is deep in denial about Mog’s death, and Annie decides to see a therapist to help her work through some of her trauma.
She also has a crush on Mog’s old boyfriend, who Mog was planning to break up with the night she got murdered. Annie knows that a romantic relationship wouldn’t work between the two of them but she’s still drawn to him in her loneliness. We don’t find out much about Annie, even though she’s the main character. She’s almost entirely defined by her grief.
This feels a lot more like an ‘issue book’ than a book about a character going through a crisis who’s interesting in their own right. The relationships are mostly believable but I never emotionally connected to the material. The characters were eh and Annie’s roller coaster of emotions lacked impact, probably because she and Mog were thinly developed and the book never broke out of problem novel territory.
Sarah's Corner 