Remember

L.A. high school senior Portia Willows, the unreliable narrator of Smith’s intense first novel, suffers from social anxiety disorder. Portia’s parents refuse to get professional help because they are repeatedly assured that her distress is just a phase. This fragile veneer of normality is ripped away when her mother and her much adored younger sister are killed in a car crash. With only her alcoholic, housebound father for company, Portia drifts deeper into numbing depression. Her days degenerate into a blur of beer drinking and watching TV, with only occasional visits from her grandmother. Early on, Portia unexpectedly forms a bond with her new neighbor Ethan Torke, who has just moved back to live with his father, and a kind of mutual love seems to evolve. But does the love only serve to mask Portia’s deteriorating reality, where memory and fantasy merge, and inevitable violence is only a breath away? Flashbacks help generate some suspense, but this is more an earnest treatise on mental illness than it is a psychological thriller. Genre fans will find few surprises. [em](Oct.) [/em]