Meet Me at Blue Hour coming April 1st, 2025 from Quill Tree Books; 288 pages
Content Warning: Memory loss, Alzheimer’s Disease, strained parental relationships
About the Author: “Sarah Suk (pronounced like soup with a K) lives in Vancouver, Canada, where she writes stories and admires mountains. She is the author of young adult novels Meet Me at Blue Hour, The Space Between Here & Now, and Made in Korea, as well as the co-writer of John Cho’s middle grade novel Troublemaker. When she’s not writing, you can find her hanging out by the water, taking film photos, or eating a bowl of bingsu” (Bio from author’s website).
Find Sarah Suk on the following platforms:
If you had the chance to erase your most painful memory, would you? Sori of Us Clinic in Busan, South Korea, specializes in memory care—more specifically, memory erasure. This is where 17-year-old Korean-Canadian Yena finds herself working over the summer while visiting her mother and head of the clinic, Dr. Bae. When the Sori Clinic begins a new study involving memory recovery, hundreds of people show up at the clinic with hopes of squeezing their loved ones in. One of these hopefuls is Lucas Pak, Yena’s ex-best friend from Canada, visiting his harabeoji who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. When their paths finally cross again, Yena expects to find answers to why their friendship ended so abruptly. The only problem is, Lucas has no idea who she is.
Meet Me at Blue Hour is a delicate story that explores loss, love, and the importance of the past. The novel features only a handful of characters, which allows Suk to stitch together individual characteristics and traits to form a close-knit community for readers to settle into. It is within this close community that important, long-lasting memories are made, and memory care is a topic that I believe is not discussed enough. My mother is a CNA and has had several Alzheimer’s and Dementia patients since the start of her career, and I appreciate Suk for spreading awareness about the effects memory loss has on not only the patient but everyone involved. In a sense, Meet Me at Blue Hour was like a memory itself. The sights, sounds, and interactions between characters felt familiar, and although I did not experience Korean culture growing up, I believe most things in childhood are universal. The expectations Lucas and Yena had for themselves were very clearly a direct result of their upbringing, which Suk explored through phone calls and conversations between the teens and their families. Although I wish the sense of betrayal felt by Yena and Lucas towards the end was exaggerated even more, Meet Me at Blue Hour is an easy yet meaningful read full of valuable life lessons.
Meet Me at Blue Hour releases on April 1st, 2025.
Pine Reads Review would like to thank SparkPoint Studio and Quill Tree Books for sending us an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Any quotes are taken from an advanced copy and may be subject to change before final publication.
Callie Andrews, Pine Reads Review Writer, Social Media, and Web