Book: The Memory Keeper

This book from the Mark Twain Award list for 2021/2 has an interesting premise:  a girl with a superior memory tries to rescue her grandmother's memory.  The only problem is that her grandmother is beginning to exhibit signs of dementia or alzheimer's.  Another issue is fact that her grandmother has a hidden past that granddaughter Lulu can't leave alone; she believes that if she can figure out her grandmother's past (which might include being a Russian spy), all of the memory issues will be resolved.

From Goodreads:

All Lulu Carter wants is to be seen. But her parents are lost in their own worlds, and Lulu has learned the hard way that having something as rare as HSAM—the ability to remember almost every single moment in her life—won’t make you popular in school.

At least Lulu has Gram, who knows the truth about Lulu’s memory and loves her all the more for it. But Gram has started becoming absentminded, and the more lost she gets, the more she depends on Lulu…until Lulu realizes her memory holds the very key to fixing Gram’s forgetfulness. Once Lulu learns that trauma can cause amnesia, all she needs to do to cure Gram is hunt down that one painful moment in Gram’s life.

With her friends Olivia and Max, Lulu digs into Gram’s mysterious past. But they soon realize some secrets should stay buried, and Lulu wonders if she ever knew Gram at all. It’s up to Lulu to uncover the truth before the only person who truly sees her slips away. ​

The author presents the story by explaining a different part of the brain in each chapter.  I thought this was interesting as I have always wondered what's happening in that strange organ in the skull really does.  Brain research keeps revealing that we don't know very much about the complexities of the human brain and how it does what it does.

Unfortunately, there is not as much of a climax and resolution as I would have liked.  Also there was no need to introduce to the incident of Lulu's "coming of age/becoming a woman", which had nothing to do with the story. Finally and perhaps most glaring, there is an awful lot of repetition with Lulu narrating over and over her fears and anxieties.  The book could have saved several of the over 300 pages by trusting the reader to understand those things rather than feeling like we needed to be reminded so often.