Canadian Korean author Sarah Suk's Meet Me at Blue Hour is an impressive multilayered story of love, both romantic and familial. Yena, 17, is working as an archive assistant at a pioneering facility for memory erasure, the Sori Clinic in Busan, Korea. Its founding director, Dr. Mira Bae ("a genius, a boss, a trailblazer") is Yena's mother. She "would not have her only daughter graduate from high school with no college plans or future aspirations," so she concocted a job that brought Yena from Vancouver, where Yena lives with her father, to Busan for a mother/daughter summer together.
On her inaugural jog to the office, Yena crashes and falls into childhood best friend Lucas, who disappeared from her life without a trace four years ago. Lucas is standing outside Sori Clinic because his beloved grandfather is losing his memories to Alzheimer's and Lucas desperately needs to get him into Sori's experimental recovery program. But adult Lucas doesn't recognize Yena at all. This time, though, Yena won't let Lucas go, even if the truth might harm more than heal.
Suk (The Space Between Here & Now) deftly alternates Yena's and Lucas's first-person points of view, with unexpected, extraordinary interstitials that feature quotidian objects imbued with the pair's shared past. While lost-and-found love is at the novel's crux, Suk also seamlessly explores strained and renewed relationships between children and parents. Suk writes wondrously developed characters, their experiences enhanced with intricate details and brilliant plot shocks as they unravel, remake, and restart their way to reconnection and recovery. --Terry Hong