Rael has been erasing things since he was nine. Not out of cruelty — out of survival. The memory of his father leaving. The sharp humiliation of a bad day. The things that hurt too much to keep. He made rules. He was careful. He told himself it was under control.
Then something frightened him badly enough that he erased an entire hour on instinct — the hour that contained the information that explains why his best friend Lena is now lying unconscious in a hospital bed.
He cannot get it back. That is the nature of what he does. It is not suppression — it is deletion. Gone. And the consequences of that deletion belong to both of them.
What unfolds is not a magical recovery. It is a slow, difficult, completely honest reckoning with the difference between a survival mechanism and a way of life — between managing pain and being present to it. Between erasing and staying.
One of the most psychologically honest YA fantasies in recent memory, Rael and the Things He Erased is a story for every reader who has ever found a way to make something hurt less and then discovered that the same thing was also keeping them from fully living.
For independent readers aged 13-16.