Tuesday 21 January 2014

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac - Gabrielle Zevin (2007)

2.5 stars

I bought this book because I read an article about young adult novels that are just as touching as John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. The list had Eleanor & Park indcluded in it so I thought they must be pretty good suggestions, however I was very underwhelmed with this book.

The premise of this book, that a teenage girl loses her memory and must continue to live her life even though she doesn't know anyone in it, was such a good idea for a book and was really interesting to read. However after the first hundred or so pages she wasn't really discovering anything new and she was so fixated on James that it made me kind of lose interest. I enjoyed the story about her family, but I found the rest of the plot, "the love story" as she refers to it, a bit weird and definitely not as interesting as even her photography project. I don't know if I had a favourite character in this book, there wasn't one particularly interesting character or one who brought a certain quality to the novel. I would recommend this book to young teenagers because I think they would get more enjoyment out of it.


Naomi loses a coin toss and has to go back inside the school to get a camera, on the way back she slips in some coffee and falls down a flight of stairs landing on her head. She rides in an ambulance with the boy who was there when she fell who tells the paramedics he's her boyfriend, later she finds out his name is James and he isn't really her boyfriend, he just didn't want her to be alone. She also finds out that she can't remember anything from the past four years, including her mother cheating on her father then getting remarried and having another child, her father getting engaged, her actual boyfriend Ace, and her best friend Will who she co-runs the yearbook comittee with. She soon breaks up with Ace and starts dating James, who has severe depression (and I would also think he has bipolar disorder) but soon he voluntarily checks himself into rehab and tells Naomi to forget him. After a few months Naomi realizes she loves Will and after her father's wedding they end up together.

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