Sing Me Forgotten

November 1, 2020

Gr 8 Up-This absorbing fantasy is a gender-swapped twist on The Phantom of the Opera. White, red-headed Isda, 17, has lived her whole life hiding in an opera house in Channe, Vaureille. She's a gravoir, born with gnarled cheeks, with the magical ability to manipulate other people's memories when they're singing. Gravoirs are so feared, they're killed at birth. Cyril Bardin, the white manager of the opera house, saved newborn Isda from drowning. Now Isda, masked and hidden, secretly manipulates the audience's minds to praise the opera's performances, ensuring its success. A talented composer, Isda is mesmerized by the singing voice of newly hired janitor Emeric, a handsome white man too untrained to perform in the opera. Isda offers to secretly coach him so she can access his memories. She sees he had a little sister who was a powerful gravoir and was captured. Unlike gravoirs, fendoirs, also facially scarred, are tolerated because they can siphon singing people's memories. The wealthy buy the elixir of people's memories to enhance their own ability to remember the past. As Cyril uses Isda's magic to advance his career, she discovers she's more powerful than she realizes and craves the freedom she's been denied. The story's leisurely beginning ramps up to a fast-paced, action-packed ending, with some fairly intense brutality. VERDICT Readers will empathize with Isda's desire to be treated like a human being and not a monster. The bittersweet but satisfying ending remains true to the characters and their story.-Sharon Rawlins, New Jersey State Lib., Trenton

Copyright 2020 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2021
Magic and music blend in this gender-flipped fantasy take on The Phantom of the Opera. Seventeen-year-old Isda lives and lurks in the shadows, catwalks, and crypts of the Channe Opera House of Vaureille. Discarded at birth and raised in secret by the calculating Cyril Bardin, Isda helps her adoptive father and the opera by manipulating audience members' memories through her forbidden gravoir magic. Unlike the indentured fendoirs who legally extract memories as an elixir--sometimes leaving the poor as Memoryless husks--all gravoirs are supposed to be executed at birth, a legacy of the bloody and brief revolution led by three much-mythologized gravoir women, Les Trois. Redheaded Isda has facial disfigurements like all gravoirs and fendoirs, hidden beneath masks that they are forced to wear in public; Isda has adorned hers with sparkling crystals and raven feathers. But the songs of Emeric Rodin, a newly arrived and lowly cleaning boy, stir Isda's magic and interest, and she begins to tutor him while also fearing addiction to the memories she takes from him. Singing, masquerades, organ music, and chandeliers ensue, elements as indebted to Andrew Lloyd Webber as Gaston Leroux. With Isda, debut author Olson offers a complex and nuanced character who both suffers persecution and commits monstrous acts, pitting typical teenage insecurities against mind-altering powers. Most characters read as White. A well-choreographed, updated take on a melodramatic classic. (Fantasy. 14-18)

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