MixedThe Texas ObserverBret Anthony Johnston is the stereotypical young literary author ... Remember Me Like This, then, is a stereotypical young literary author’s debut novel. It comes heavily hyped and praised, features beautiful prose and almost no plot, flirts with the trappings of a genre novel but dares not dirty its hands with the actual workings of one, and generally disappoints ... That’s the vast majority of the novel: The Campbells feel various things about Justin’s kidnapping and about his return. They feel guilty, they feel relieved, they feel nervous, and on and on for hundreds of pages ... Worse still, Johnston seems to want to have written a more dramatic novel, so he has shoehorned in thrilling-sounding scenes of conflict that end up as meaningless diversions ... the dominant experience of reading this book is that of watching an author attempt to write drama into scenes in which nothing of consequence actually happens. Johnston has tremendous facility with language, and when he imbues a scene with real conflict, I was interested and invested. But those scenes are few and far between, and without convincing drama, the story never gains traction.
