This begins melodramatically, and it never gets out of that mode. The narrator is a high schooler who is just super super in love-- then his girlfriend ends up in a coma. So then he is super super sad. Then another girl comes along, so he is super super torn. And it just goes on and on and on and on for 529 pages... and 852 chapters! The chapters are these short little things, and the paragraphs are tiny, too; sometimes less than a sentence apiece. For example, here's a page literally at random:

I no longer had any patience left.

These dark desires to strike

were horrifying to me.

My patience had worn thin with time.

And it seemed to get worse.

What seemed like a long time ago,

a far off land separated by the seven seas,

while everything was still summer,

where everything was still simple,

I had been agreeable to all.

Slowly, surely,

things changed

and it was eating me

from the inside out.

I was no longer a pleasant kid.

I was no longer an innocent boy.

Worse, I realized this,

in this moment,

staring into the eyes of the Devil,

I realized my own darkness. (ch. 804, p. 494)

Sorry for the lengthy quotation there, but I wanted you to get a sense of just how overwrought the prose is, and just how excruciating its choppy, overemphasized short sentences are to read.

The novel was serialized originally, and gives every indication of being made up as it goes along. Key concepts seem to spring up out of nowhere, especially the identity of the so-called culprit. The end is particularly unsatisfying. This is a short book, and it took me weeks to drag myself through it. Irredeemably painful.

Visually stunning and such an interesting premise with a mix of romance, technology, poetry and prose. Japanese manga meets A Wrinkle in Time. Very cool. ( )

Ah, the throes of teenage love.

Actually, maybe more like, uggg, the throes of teenage love.

It's a bit hard to say which of the above paragraphs I'd slot Secondhand Memories into. Because while reading about teenage love is like watching a movie in Technicolor, it's also like watching a movie in ultra-bright Technicolor, while hung-over, with a migraine, when workers are tearing up your street with jackhammers. Secondhand Memories wore me down. There's just so much. Written as a cell-phone novel, none of the individual "chapters" are overwhelming taken on their own, a page at most, written in what almost feels like poetry. But there are like eight hundred of them. Eight hundred little, angst-ridden, teenager-problems, non-rhyming poems, which often repeat what the previous little, angst-ridden, teenager-problems, non-rhyming poem has just told us. Likely in a serialized form, this isn't so grating: your phone beeps with a little dash of literature in your day, huzzah! But lined up the way it is, one after another, so much teenage angst. So much. So much much much much much much much.

The plot is pretty standard soap-opera. Boy and Girl fall in love. Something a bit spooky goes on. Then girl falls in coma. Boy doesn't know what to do with his life. Meets another girl. Now what? Does he wait forever for Girl One (Coma) to wake up or move on with Girl Two? Boy, of course, has zero flaws, and the flaws he does have are those sorts of flaws wounded heroes have, which aren't really flaws as much as attributes. There's a cartoony villain and a whole roster of vaguely interchangeable friends. They go to Kyoto (where FamilyMart still owes me the 100 Yen I dropped in their ice cream freezer and couldn't get out). They get almost-mugged by some Nazis. You know, typical. It doesn't really matter. We're about seven-hundred-and-ninety-eight little, angst-ridden, teenager-problems, non-rhyming poems too many to really matter.

It's a diversion, like bad television. Not much more. You kind of get into the groove of it and then are too lazy to change to the channel.

Secondhand Memories by Takatsu went on sale December 24, 2014.

I received a copy free from Librarything in exchange for an honest review. ( )

This book is like reading the facebook status updates of a mourning, depressed teenager who is afraid moving on with his life will somehow ruin his memories of his first love. If you care about the protagonist, this can work, but I don't think it worked for me.

At first, the dreamy quality of the short prose felt like strange poetry, especially suited to the love and mystery of the book. But unfortunately, it kind of turns to wallowing in misery and then a decided lack of character growth or plot advancement. I'm not a big fan of the tragic love story rich with self-contemplation, I guess. There's hints of a mystery early on and repeated a few times, but it's halfway through the book and the narrator is still too wrapped up in his own sorrow to contemplate anything bigger. I've tried to read this for half a year, but I think it's time to accept that this one just isn't for me a move on. ( )

I've never actually read a cell phone novel before. I've heard of them, but this was a first for me, and in some ways this was a lot like reading a novel in verse, with short chapters (often only about a page), and quick and simple descriptions. It was interesting. And, honestly, I think the format is fun, and definitely makes for a quick read. Still, I had some issues with this novel. I wanted to enjoy it, and I definitely enjoyed reading about some of the awesome places I got to visit while in Japan, but I just had a hard time with the characters. They were a little more difficult to identify with than I cared for, which made things tedious. Their emotions rocketed all over the place and there was no firm grasp of their motivations. Which is probably more accurate for teens than I care to admit, but still, it made for trying reading. Anyhow, definitely a fun format, and it made me miss Japan (and the amazing food...what I wouldn't give for some good Japanese food, haha!), but just not a novel for me. ( )