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Friday, January 04, 2008

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac - Gabrielle Zevin

Sounds like it would be a pretty short book, doesn't it? Get it? MEMOIRS of someone with no memory? Quite an interesting pretense for a book, and one that I really enjoyed. Naomi, resident amensiac, takes a fall down the stairs of her school, and when she comes to she doesn't remember anything for about the past four years, including her boyfriend, her best friend, the fact that her parents are divorced, her very young baby sister....Things before then she remembers, but after that, nothing. I think that would be a pretty strange and disconcerting thing to have happen. It would seem like all the safety you sort of take for granted just in knowing who you are would be stripped away and that would be pretty hard to deal with.

Which is pretty much how it turns out. Naomi faces a lot of struggles in her re-engagement with life. Some things work out really well for her, and others not so great.

I found this book to be funny, surprising but also sometimes predictable, heartbreaking, and really thought provoking. Who would you become if you had it do all over again starting today?

I listened to this on my iPod and I really liked the reading of this novel. I got it at the Multnomah County Library.

1 comment:

Ms. Yingling said...

This has gone over well with my students, as has this author's other book, Elsewhere. As a companion read, I recommend Weatherly's Kat Got Your Tongue, which is also about a girl with amnesia.