Noggin

This is probably one of the single most powerful books I have read in my entire life. It made me want to laugh, to cry, to shake Travis silly. It takes a lot for a book to impact me on that level, most of the books I have read and love didn't even come close to making me feel how this book did. Travis Coates was an incredibly interesting character, a little thick at times, but that made him all the more interesting. His obsession with the past and placement in a future he didn't want made everything he did, no matter how small, something that seemed quite beautiful. He is the kind of guy I'd want in a best friend, honest and courageous, I couldn't look away even when his actions made me internally cringe. If you haven't already, now show more would be a great time to jump on the Noggin train, just so you know that once you've hopped on you have no chance of returning. show less

Originally published over at Full of Words.

I wanted to like Noggin more than I did. It has a clever premise, it’s definitely funny, and it delivers on more than one genuinely touching moment. Unfortunately, despite everything the book does right, I just wanted to wring the main character’s neck after a certain point. During one scene late in the book I actually grimaced in horror at his stupidity.

Travis Coates starts out with a lot of sympathetic qualities. Noggin opens as he awakens from a surgery to attach his severed head to a donor body. In his former life, Travis was a sixteen-year-old kid with inoperable cancer. When it became clear that he was going to die, he volunteered for an experimental program with a chance to save his show more life.

The program worked, but that catch is this: five years passed while his head was cryogenically frozen. He’s still mentally sixteen, but his friends are in college and his parents lived with the grief of his loss for years.

That mental age ends up being Travis’ biggest obstacle. Everyone else has grown up and moved on, but he’s still petulant and selfish and unwilling to let go of the past. When he discovers that his best friend and girlfriend didn’t wait around for him to come back, he proceeds to blow up their lives and friendships with his behavior.

Travis spends most of Noggin trying to win back the love of his former girlfriend, Cate, who is now five years older than him and engaged to another guy. It’s obvious from the start that Travis’ quest is a huge mistake. He’s going to fail, and when he does, he’s going to ruin his relationship with someone he claims to love.

There’s probably a way to tell this story that would make it feel like Travis and Cate are star-crossed lovers, but I never found myself sympathizing with his wish to win her back. He just seemed like a pathetic asshole. His self-delusion lasts for so long and goes to such extremes that I lost all patience for his idiocy.

Travis is exactly the sort of “nice guy” who just won’t take a hint, and the Cate is so forgiving that she just keeps giving him the benefit of the doubt. When Travis makes a completely boneheaded “grand gesture” near the end of the book, Cate actually forgives him… and then a few chapters later he ignores her feelings yet again. I groaned aloud.

Honestly, I’m not sure I believe that Travis learns anything over the course of the book. Instead, it feels like he just decides to blame everyone else for not understanding what he’s going through.

Although I might be willing to give John Corey Whaley’s books another chance, I’m glad I’m done spending time with Travis Coates. show less

God, Travis is a piece of shit teenager. Like, seriously uncomfortable, intense second-hand embarrassment. I am Kyle and Hatton telling him DO NOT DO THE THING.

But goddamn if I didn't cry over them meeting Jeremy Pratt. When Travis wasn't obsessing about Cate, the other parts were really great.

Travis is a young man who should have died from leukemia, but instead signs up for an experimental brain/head transplant that cryogenic-ally freezes his head in order to transplant it on a new body some day when medicine is ready for this next step. He wakes up 5 years later on a new body, the second successful head transplant in history. The story chronicles the next year of his life as he & his family and friends adjust to having Travis back in their lives, five years after they all said goodbye to him. He is still 16, but his best friend and girl friend are now 21 years old. This was a powerful story of the things that we want to stay the same, but the things that change as we grow older. It touches on the life of his best friend who show more has been struggling for years to come out about his homosexuality while trying to suppress it for years. His parents' relationship has changed in the 5 years he's been "gone" and his girl friend has moved on with a new relationship. This is one I will definitely be suggesting a lot next year. I may need to get a 2nd copy in the library! show less

This book shouldn't have worked because the premise really is ridiculous -- a teen whose body was dying was given a chance at life by having his healthy head severed from his body and preserved until a healthy donor body could be found and attached. It worked! He, his family, and his friends were told it would be many many years before the technology would be developed to attach the head to a donor body, but in the end it only took five years. The silliest thing to me was that his head was attached and then the medical part of the story was done -- he was sent home to live and return to school. But the brilliant side of the story was that while five years had passed, it seemed to Travis that he just woke up from a nap. Suddenly his show more friends were five years older, his girlfriend was engaged, and ultimately he discovered that his parents had been divorced for three years -- they tried keeping their divorce a secret from him but he found out. Suddenly this opportunity to live was confusing and maybe not 100% a good thing for him or people who loved him. By creating this nutty situation, the author gently introduces teen readers to a variety of existential questions that have no clear-cut answer. show less

Noggin was fantastic and John Corey Whaley is amazeballs. I was expecting funny, and while the book has a lot of humor, it is surprisingly touching and powerful. Travis dies at age sixteen of leukemia, but he volunteers for an experimental cryogenic procedure and wakes up five years later with his head attached to the body of someone else (another teen with a terminal illness who donated his body to the project). Sounds crazy, right? And while it is pretty off-the-wall, it packs an emotional punch as it explores what the process is like for his parents to have their son brought back from the dead after grieving him for five years, and how painful it is for Travis to see that his friends have grown up and left him behind. It's joyful and show more awful and just a fabulous read.

I would recommend Noggin to fans of John Green (especially The Fault in Our Stars) and Whaley's other book, Where Things Come Back. show less

"You can find ways to be okay with dying, but you can’t fake your way through living."

Cuando Travis se entera que el cáncer que tiene es incurable, toma la única decisión que le da un poco de esperanza: permitir que le corten la cabeza -la única parte de su cuerpo que el cáncer no ha tocado- y la criogenicen.

"Sometimes you love someone so much that going and doing something crazy like having your head frozen and convincing everyone you’re coming back isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds."

5 años después, Travis está vivo de nuevo. En cuerpo que no es su cuerpo, en una vida que no es la que él esperaba; el tiempo pasó para todos, menos para él. Ahora su mejor amigo está en la universidad y su novia está comprometida.

"I

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couldn’t really see all that much difference between the life where I was dying and the one where everyone had become a stranger."

Esta es una historia que intenta ser única y cómica. La palabra clave es "intenta", porque no lo logra. Tenemos toda esta trama acerca de la criogenización que promete mucho pero que nunca es realmente explorada, dejándonos con otra historia coming-of-age.

Vemos solo de pasada la lucha de Travis contra el prejuicio de la gente, que lo ve bien como un milagro o como una abominación. Mientras que el mayor enfoque se encuentra en como se esfuerza por encontrarle sentido a su nueva vida, ahora que nada es como era.

Toda la trama involucrando a Cate, fue un poco incomodo de leer(?). Es decir me daba cierta sensación de pena ajena, porque sí, su amor era real, pero tras 5 años de ausencia, Cate aprendió a vivir sin Travis. Y por más que ella le dice "ey, seamos solo amigos" el se niega a aprender a vivir sin ella. Asi que todos los esfuerzos de Travis por reconquistarla resultan un poco patéticos la escena donde le pide matrimonio a Cate, mientras su verdadero prometido está allí con ellos... *cringe* pero también conmovedores.

"I had to find her and tell her, show her, that Travis Coates might be mostly ash in some mystery container hidden in his parents’ house, but that the part of him that found its way back would always be incomplete without her."

Durante toda la lectura tuve un nudo en la garganta. Esta es una de esas historias que te hace sentir y al final te dejan un poco drenado emocionalmente y extrañamente insatisfecho. Y no es que pasen cosas particularmente tristes, nada de manipulación sentimental por parte del autor, es solo que tiene un aire melancólico, un aire de pérdida que es difícil que no te afecte.

Así que, si bien tiene sus defectos, Noggin te hace reflexionar. show less