Carolee Dean's "Forget Me Not"

{[['']]}

Young Adult author Carolee Dean lives in Albuquerque, NM with her husband, teenage daughter, and a boxer named Maya. She works at a local high school as a speech-language pathologist where she finds inspiration from students, hallways, and the ravens who occupy the courtyard when the kids are all in class.

Dean says she envisions all of her books as movies. In fact, she hired a media arts student from UNM to create this book trailer for Forget Me Not that looks a lot like a preview for a film. Here the author dreamcasts an adaptation of her latest novel:

Forget Me Not is a paranormal verse novel exploring cyber-bullying and teen suicide. Sixteen year old Ally Cassell finds herself on an abandoned hallway of Raven Valley High School after compromising photos of her are texted around the school. She spends the day writing in her journal, watching the other students out the window, and wondering how her secret romance with senior football star, Davis Connor, went so terribly wrong.

At the end of the day, she starts to leave the hallway to catch her bus, only to see Davis standing outside with his real girlfriend, Darla. Ally decides to stay on the hallway all night, and the next day when she wakes up, there are dead people on the hallway with her.

If I were allowed to cast the film adaptation, I'd choose Jennifer Lawrence to play Ally Cassell. Lawrence played Katniss Everdeen in the The Hunger Games, the brutal survival tale that pitted teens against each other in a battle to the death - good preparation for Dean's story about high school survival.

For the role of Davis Connor, I'd choose Mark Salling, Noah "Puck" Puckerman, the tough football stud turned choir boy in the television hit Glee.

The role for the most colorful character in Forget Me Not, Elijah McCall, the boy who has loved Ally for years and would do anything to save her from the Hallway, would go to Andrew Garfield of The Amazing Spider-Man fame.

Elijah knows the hallway all to well. He spent some time there after taking a bottle of sleeping pills. Afterward he was sent to a psychiatric hospital and when he came out he spent a month speaking in iambic pentameter. In spite of his own weaknesses and quirks, Elijah is the only one brave enough to try to save Ally, and that role requires a true hero.

Learn more about the book and author at Carolee Dean's website.

--Marshal Zeringue