I wish I could forget you, False Memory.

The nicest thing I can say about Dan Krokos’s debut YA “sci-fi” novel FALSE MEMORY is that it’s mercifully short.

17-year-old Miranda North wakes up in a mall with her memory wiped. Well, just the autobiographical stuff—she still remembers how to do parkour and unleash blasts of psychic energy, amongst other handy things. Miranda’s Sweet-Ass Powers derive from a combination of being an Orphan/Child Soldier raised in a Cliche Underground Training Facility, some requisite Genetic Fuckery, and my personal favorite, Virginity Preservation. (Virginity is the fifth and most powerful force of nature. Fact.) After blasting—and inadvertently killing—several people with her Psychic Fear Ray, Miranda meets Peter, a boy who claims to be part of her elite Teens With Sweet-Ass Powers squadron. Peter is an Exposition Fairy who promises to help Miranda get her memory back. But Miranda’s memory may be missing because she holds a Dangerous Secret.

Blah, blah, blah. It’s like someone threw darts at TV Tropes and called it a novel.

Krokos’s spin on the familiar is to up the ante in sheer ridiculousness: the plot ticks the boxes not just for amnesia and superpowers, but motorcycle chases, clones, helicopters with blazing miniguns, vehicles bursting into flame, masses of cannon fodder civilians dying, etc. etc. It’s a checklist of comic book/bad action movie cliches and offers about as much pathos and gravity as a Michael Bay film.

This girl is approximately 7500% more badass than Miranda.

The characters are hollow shells with no sense of interiority. They glide through the plot without any sense of personal agency, transparently maneuvered by the hand of the author. Miranda likes two boys because there has to be a love triangle. Miranda does badass things because it’s badass to be a badass and this book is BADASS ENOUGH FOR BOYS, guys. There’s no evidence of Miranda’s inner drives or motivation. She is Spunky Teen Girlbot, Kicker of Asses, Lover of Two Improbably Attractive White Boys.

During the long, talky exposition scenes, where we learn Shocking!New!Revelation! upon Shocking!New!Revelation! (because infodumping is okay if you do it via dialogue, right?), you could hide the names and not be able to tell which character is speaking. They’re all stereotypes: Fiery Redhead, Token Asian Badass Chick, Boy Next Door, Bad Boy—all helpfully color-coded by hair and race, lest you forget which vertice of the love triangle is randomly kissing Miranda when they’re both drowning at the bottom of a river. Miranda, of course, is a passive audience for the romantic overtures of the boys, and reacts with all the enthusiasm of a frozen side of beef.

If the heroes are interchangeably bland, the villains are worse: they’re cartoonishly Eeeeevil and prone to pontificating about their Evil Plans at great length and with conspicuous clarity. Miranda watches people die before her eyes with about the same vacuous boredom as she observes the paint on her toenails. It’s all so thin, one-dimensional, and strangely lifeless. The explosions and the bullets have more personality than these drones.

Early on, when Miranda meets up with her squad, she simply accepts the fact that the Bad Boy WIPED ALL OF HER GOL’ DURN MEMORIES in order for her to escape their Cliche Underground Training Facility because of Reasons. Bad Boy and Token Asian didn’t have to lose theirs to escape; why did Miranda? Well, Bad Boy doesn’t explain and Miranda doesn’t ask and the reader facepalms. Minor plotting inconsistencies and implausibilities like this abound, and it’s all delivered in brisk yet stubbornly dull prose that describes forests as “trees” and characters as faceless bags of clothes and meat. Everything floats in a kind of vague, motion-blurred haze.

Also, for some reason, the protags and antags mostly fight each other with wooden staves. Not, y’know, guns, of which there are endless amounts.

Someone played a little too much of this while writing.

I’m reminded unpleasantly of James Frey’s YA classic, I AM NUMBER FOUR. If you like that kind of screenplay-esque novel on training wheels, this is right up your alley.

At least this doesn’t fail in the same way as, say, Karsten Knight’s misogynistic WILDEFIRE. Krokos shows no capacity to write a believable female voice—let alone a believable human voice—but at least he fails in a sort of bland, inoffensive way. It might have been more interesting if he had been offensive. Throw in some slut-shaming, or internalized misogyny. Something!

FALSE MEMORY could have been a fun dark comedy. It possesses all the elements of comedy except humor. Teen boys would probably devour this when the Call of Duty servers are down. Anyone else will find themselves experiencing similar symptoms to Miranda when it’s over: forgetting all about it.