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Loading... Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiacby Gabrielle Zevin
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A fun book. Generally more for teens, and more directed towards girls. The book is fun, and the ending is a nice change to the disney's standard of Happy Ever After. ( )Reviewed by Me for TeensReadToo.com When sixteen-year-old Naomi Porter takes a header down the front steps of Thomas Purdue Country Day School, she loses a lot more than her pride. Although she remembers the ride in the ambulance to the hospital with James Larkin, and recalls that her blood ended up on his shirt, and even remembers that he assured the ambulance driver that he was her boyfriend, she's having a really hard time remembering anything prior to that. Anything, say, that happened in the last four years. Awake and alert in the hospital with her dad by her side, Naomi knows that something's wrong. She knows her name, and she knows where she is. What she doesn't quite understand is that the last tangible memory she has happened when she was twelve. She can tell by the way her body feels that she's not twelve any longer. And then comes the first of many shockers: her parents are divorced. Oh, and her mother is remarried to her high school sweetheart, and they have a toddler named Chloe, who happens to be her half-sister. And she has a boyfriend named Ace, who conveniently enough is away at tennis camp. And her best friend, William "Coach" Landsman, is also the co-editor of the school paper, The Phoenix, a position she shares. And on and on the list goes, until all Naomi wants to do is scream. In the course of a few minutes and one bump on the head, Naomi has lost four years worth of memories. She still knows she's adopted, she recalls her life up until the age of twelve, but everything between seventh grade and her current position as a junior in high school is a blank slate. For some, she's a girl to be pitied. For others, she's just another teen looking for attention. For herself, and her father, and her best friend, and her boyfriend, and the boy she begins to fall in love with, she's something else entirely -- an enigma, a girl without a past who must forge ahead to make her own future. I truly enjoyed MEMOIRS OF A TEENAGE AMNESIAC. The tone of the story is a perfectly balanced mix of humor, seriousness, and the search for identity. There are moments that are sad, and even downright heartbreaking, mixed with scenes of hilarity. Ms. Zevin, the author of one of my favorite books ever, ELSEWHERE, has penned another story that will leave you wondering and thinking long after you turn the final page. With the flip of a coin, Naomi Porter’s life gets literally turned upside down. She goes back to school to get the yearbook camera and hits her head on the steps causing a memory loss of the last four years. She doesn’t remember her parent’s divorce or that she now has a little sister. She doesn’t remember her tennis star boyfriend or Will, her kind of nerdy bestfriend with an obsession for making mixed-CDs and the yearbook. She does latch onto the boy in the ambulance with her, the moody, depressed, once suicidal James. Naomi decides that she doesn’t like the person she is finding out about and sets out to reinvent herself. She changes just about everything she can. While doing this, she pushes Will away and damages their friendship. Meanwhile, Naomi and James form a relationship built on both of them not having a past. Naomi because she can’t remember hers and James because he refuses to talk about his. I read this book for a college course and I enjoyed it, but felt that some of the problems presented were just solved by the end and you don't really know how. In Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, Naomi Porter is an average teenage girl at an average high school, with an average boyfriend. Until she forgets all of it. After falling down the stairs outside the school, she develops amnesia and has to rebuild her life from the pieces she remembers. The author, Gabrielle Zevin, introduces the reader to the characters as Naomi sees them, with very honest opinions and develops Naomi's character as Naomi develops her own personality, and because of this, the reader feels very close to her. The story overall is not too different from many teen-novels today and involves many of the same themes, such as wanting to be popular and struggling through hard classes, but Gabrielle Zevin writes in a way that keeps the reader interested, and it is definitely worth reading. Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac reminds me of the Sloppy Firsts series and if you have read either, you are sure to like the other. I strongly recommend that you read Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin as it will keep you reading and you won't ever get bored! About a girl named Naomi. One day her and a friend played heads and tails to see which person would get the camera back inside the school. Naomi picks heads. The coin lands on tails so she has to go get the camera. She falls down a flight of stairs and hits her head. She is taken to a hospital where they diagnose her with amnesia. She learns that her parents are divorced, she has a boyfriend, her dad is engaged,and her mom already has a daughter with another man. She has to get used to her new life. She gets to know the guy who saved her and they become very close friends. She has nothing in common with her boyfriend so she dumps him and goes out with the guy who saved her. She learns about his troubled past and is remembering more about her past. They both never fall in love in the end but Naomi is getting used to her new life more and more everyday. She learns that nothing can be perfect and sometimes its better to forget about things that happened in the past. no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0374349460, Hardcover)If Naomi had picked tails, she would have won the coin toss. She wouldn’t have had to go back for the yearbook camera, and she wouldn’t have hit her head on the steps. She wouldn’t have woken up in an ambulance with amnesia. She certainly would have remembered her boyfriend, Ace. She might even have remembered why she fell in love with him in the first place. She would understand why her best friend, Will, keeps calling her “Chief.” She’d know about her mom’s new family. She’d know about her dad’s fiancée. She never would have met James, the boy with the questionable past and the even fuzzier future, who tells her he once wanted to kiss her. She wouldn’t have wanted to kiss him back. But Naomi picked heads. After her remarkable debut, Gabrielle Zevin has crafted an imaginative second novel all about love and second chances. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:11 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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