Hello Everyone!
Summary:
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.
Notes: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year
Memoirs was a really enjoyable book overall. The characters that the reader is most prevalently exposed to, Naomi, Will, Alice, and Yvette, along with Naomi’s father and mother are all really enjoyable characters. My favorite relationship was, hands down, the relationship between Naomi and Will. Naomi was a great median between a reliable and not so reliable narrator, which was fun. The reader got to go through the emotions that came with her memory coming back and her understanding where she had left her life off at. I especially loved the scene when she is in her bedroom for the first time after the accident and she finds the birth control in the drawer. Goodness gracious that was a great scene to read, making me laugh while I read it on my couch. The way that Zevin developed Will as a character was also very amendable, considering that he had to compete in the reader’s mind with Naomi’s boyfriends/lovers. He was so dependable and was the perfect type of friend to balance out Naomi’s amnesia. His quirky attitude, his love for Yearbook, which is an aspect of school that I applaud Zevin for including because of how under explored it is in the school settings of many books, along with his attempt at memory jumping strategies in the form of mixtapes made him instantly stand out from the rest of the characters in the novel.Speaking of which, the love interests were all over the spectrum in this book. Ace was sporty, chin-up and the reader can’t help to be compassionate for him in the beginning. I mean his girl friend fell down stairs and now has amnesia, which has to suck for the both of them. I couldn’t really come to terms with the character of James in my mind. I really liked the James that we saw at the beginning of the book and it was right that Naomi moved on to something so different after Ace, but I didn’t really feel like the direction that he was taken by Zevin worked. I don’t know how exactly I would have re-written that section if I had to but it just didn’t really seem that the direction chosen for the character was flushed out. Which was one of my major cons with the novel.
Cons: Naomi moves through three relationships in the novel, (if we are counting the thing between her and Will as a relationship, even though it was planted and never delivered on), which wasn’t something I hugely disliked but it wasn’t my favorite.
Naomi has a significant amount of commendable traits but I couldn’t help but notice that she was a compulsive liar. I also don’t like how she handled her parents divorce and don’t think that the “slut” scene between her and her mom was necessary.
Consent was a topic that could be discussed with this novel because it was brought up several times, but all of the almost sexual/sexual encounters between characters just made me uncomfortable in the way that they were handled.
The relationship between Naomi and her mom and the way that James’s character was developed really annoyed me. Naomi immediately has conflict between her mom and her during the book and isn’t every fully resolved, the relationship just kind of hangs in the air for the whole book. Also, as previously stated, James.
Pros: I loved the writing style and completely expect myself to pick up another book from Zevin.
Will!
I really enjoyed that Zevin chose parts of school life that aren’t really popular in most novels. Theatre, Yearbook, photography elective were all classes that were brought up and being someone who loves all of these things, it was really fun to read about. It was also fun to talk about the Yearbook sections with my Yearbook editor and have her agree with the presentation of how stressful Yearbook is and how much it really ends up being a lot of work for a little bit of time in the spotlight. Like Will, she thinks it is worth it though, and I agree.
I really loved the first half of the novel and believe it was the strongest part.
I like that Zevin expressed a Bi relationship in the novel but didn’t throw it in the reader’s face. It was just there and it blended into the rest of the novel perfectly.
Undecided: The end was just a meh. I feel like the first half was much stronger than the last. However, I don’t think that it was terrible.
Rating:
4 out of 5 stars
92%
Age Level:
YA
Jaime