I picked up this book when I noticed a posistive testimonial by Annie Proulx. Laura Hendrie dishes up stark tales of a miniscule, single-industry (sugar beets) Colorado town where dust and snow blow alternately, and people have little to do outside of work besides observe each other and play off their neighbors' mistakes. The book's structure is nine separate but related tales, each building on characters from a previous story. The grittiness of the high plains is palpable in the relentless but subtle style Hendrie uses to convey hard living by people on the fringe of society beyond Stygo. One of these people, Essie Angel, decides she never wants to see any more than the limited view from Stygo after she gets a taste of the making of TV talk shows in the aftermath of her 19-year-old brother's conviction for murder. Stygo is populated with children who stay under furniture or porches and steal candy compulsively. Depressing? Yes, but usefully so -- I am glad to peek safely into the flip points of view of small town life this book gave me, without having to live there. Publishers MacMurray & Beck contributed to a very beautiful and thoughtful presentation with illustrations at the beginning of each story, repeated individually throughout the "chapter."

This is a WONDERFUL book - amazing insight into the human condition. Everyone should read this!

"Remember Me" grabs you and doesn't let go. Hendrie's voice for Rose is defiant, but her core is one of warmth, tenderness and vulnerability. You'll be engrossed by the story of Rose and her hometown of Quedero, New Mexico. You'll laugh, cry, and perhaps recognize yourself in the struggles of Rose, Frank, Birdie, Alice, and the rest of the bunch. The best book I've read in a long time. Hendrie is quite a talent and a valued find!

What remains sacred when everything is for sale? What happens to a tightly-knit community when heritage is traded for an illusory economic security?

Laura Hendrie sets "Remember Me" in the forgotten New Mexico town of Queduro. The residents, once miners and shepherds, now rely on tourists for economic survival. Queduro is the most isolated of mountain towns, cut off from the rest of the world in October through May by impassible snows. The town has long spent its winters bent to embroidery, but only in recent years has the outside world developed a taste for their intricately worked crafts.

Into this picture of a town struggling to create and maintain the perfect tourist enviroment are set some fairly eccentric characters. Rose Devonic, a twenty-nine year old woman who's been an orphan for the last thirteen years, is in Queduro because it's the only home she's ever known. Rose is as stubborn as she is strong, and she's determined to chart her own course in spite of the town elder's wanting her to spout the tourist line. Already teetering on the far edge of acceptance, Rose crosses the invisible line when she challenges Alice, the sister of a local motel owner, who has returned to this town she'd rather forget to sell her brother's business.

Queduro residents, sharply attuned to the business damage eccentrics could wreak, have had it with Rose. Alice presents a different, but fully equal challenge. Though she comes across as a strong and determined seventy-year-old, her mind has started to wander. It is only a matter of time before the town begins to turn on her as well.

Laura Hendrie crafts an incredibly lovely and moving tale in this first novel. Though set in the west, her themes are universal. Rose's loss of her home is paralleled by Alice's struggle to hold on to her memory. It's a conflict which unites some very unlikely allies.

It would be easy, and unfair, to characterize this work as a book which would appeal only to women. The main characters are women, but the issues raised by this work cross gender lines as easily as they do geographic ones. It is a book that looks at what makes a hero, and how does one make a home. It seems, in Hendrie's vision, home has very little to do with physical grandeur, and a whole lot to do with what you love.

This is a wonderful story, beautifully told, and a total immersion experience that should not be missed.

Memory -- its presence and its absence, its wonder and its terror, its helpfulness and its harm -- weaves its way through Laura Hendrie's REMEMBER ME like a minor-key musical leitmotif. Rose Devonic, lifelong resident of tiny Queduro, New Mexico, struggles against the memories of the townspeople; the failing memory of her sometime-nemesis, Alice Pinkston; the bittersweet memory of a family killed in a car accident when Rose was just 16.

This is a novel about belonging and difference, remembering and forgetting, acceptance and rejection. Hendrie makes you care about Rose, seeing the world through her slightly offbeat, but clear and decisive eyes.

I opened REMEMBER ME at bedtime and turned the last page at 5:00 AM. I couldn't rest without knowing how Rose's life turned out.

Read this book. Now.