Review: (Don't You) Forget About Me by Kate Karyus Quinn

Title: (Don't You) Forget About Me
Author: Kate Karyus Quinn
Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5 Stars)
Hardcover, 336 Pages
Published June 2014

Summary: Welcome to Gardnerville. A place where no one gets sick. And no one ever dies. Except...There’s a price to pay for paradise. Every fourth year, the strange power that fuels the town exacts its payment by infecting teens with deadly urges. In a normal year in Gardnerville, teens might stop talking to their best friends. In a fourth year, they’d kill them. Four years ago, Skylar’s sister, Piper, was locked away after leading sixteen of her classmates to a watery grave. Since then, Skylar has lived in a numb haze, struggling to forget her past and dull the pain of losing her sister. But the secrets and memories Piper left behind keep taunting Skylar—whispering that the only way to get her sister back is to stop Gardnerville’s murderous cycle once and for all.

I'm going to start off this review by pointing out that Kate Karyus Quinn has a sick, twisted mind...and I loved every second of the book that mind came up with. I'd just been discharged from the hospital after an emergency stay for my appendix, and I was supposed to go right home for medical observation and not do anything...but I convinced my parents to let me hobble into Barnes & Noble and get this book. And lucky me, it was the last one on the shelf!

So. About the book. Gardnerville seems like the perfect place when you don't know the true logistics of it--a rumored town where people live well past a century, nobody ever gets sick, and if you're already sick with a deadly disease, you're cured as soon as you come in. What the pamphlets DON'T explain is that every fourth year, one teen in town gets so much pent up emotion and magic that they explode with a series of psychotic events that take down a couple of teens in town with them.

I loved every single second of this book and found it hard to put it down, which is why I was actually lucky to be on medical observation because I wasn't allowed to do much more than sit down and read, anyway. This book totally and completely screwed with my mind in ways I can't even explain without spoiling the book. I literally just finished it half an hour ago, and I had to close the book and sit there and blink at the sky for a few minutes before silently mouthing What the heck was that? And then having my brain practically implode from all of the mind-bending stuff that I find out.

Kate Karyus Quinn leaves the reader with some questions at the end of the book, as most endings of books should and do, but I feel like the major questions I had that would've put me into cardiac arrest if I was left questioning about were all answered nicely. The ending still tugged at my heart, though, and made my brain ache like it had a nice run through a garbage disposal. My mind was absolutely BLOWN. It was freaking PERFECT. Hats off (I'm actually not wearing a hat right now so awkward) to Karyus Quinn for a book that gave me a literal headache in the best way when I finished.

I was not, I repeat, was not expecting that book to end the way it did. I'm trying so hard not to spoil the book for all of you who haven't read it (and if you have, feel free to drop a comment below and tell me how you felt about the ending WITHOUT SPOILING IT!). If you haven't read it, add it to your TBR list IMMEDIATELY. You won't regret it, I promise.

All in all, (Don't You) Forget About Me was a great, twisted, chilling book about a severely messed up town that left me in complete wonder, and it was a book with an ending that quite literally blew my mind. Loved it!