The Memory of Animals

by Claire Fuller

Monday, June 5, 2023

Featured image for The Memory of Animals

This starts in what now seems a pretty reasonable manner - Neffy’s volunteering for a vaccine trial with a pandemic raging around her. I was about to get all “but this totally isn’t how vaccine trials are run” when I realised we are in some other reality, some other pandemic! Everything rapidly goes awry and I don’t want to give the plot away but it’s quickly clear that the details of how vaccine trials work are the least of our scientific worries here. There’s all sorts of odd things going on, and the science is not the point it’s just used to show up how humans behave in all kinds of odd situations. It’s hard to describe, but I enjoyed the book and the differences between the character’s viewpoints on what was happening to them. The conclusion of the book left me with more questions than answers, not always a bad thing but here it felt like the author just chose to wrap up rather than making sense of the threads and I felt a bit short changed.