Book Review: Memoirs of A Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin

Title: Memoirs of A Teenage Amnesiac

Author: Gabrielle Zevin

# Of Pages: 288

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Publication Date: August 21, 2007

Level: Young Adult

Rating: 3 Hearts

Synopsis

(From Amazon.com)

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.

My Verdict

I finally finished! Wahoo! This has been my backpack book, which means it never leaves my backpack so that I always have something to read when I’m early to class or class gets canceled, etc… Anyway, that also means that it takes me eons to finish. I’ve been reading this one for months! 

I liked this book, it was good, but I had thought I was going to love this book. I liked it right from the get go and thought it would only get better but instead it just went downhill from there.

The whole story is pretty anti-climatic. The most exciting part is the beginning and after that you just follow Naomi through her daily life as she struggles with her feelings and coming to terms with not being able to remember her past.

Honestly, Naomi drove me crazy. I understand she just lost her memory and all that, which must be extremely frustrating but she acted like such a baby afterwards. She used her memory loss as an excuse for everything. Another thing about Naomi that got on my nerves was how fast she jumped from guy to guy. She always had someone waiting in the wings for her, which was just really annoying and unrealistic.

The best character in this book was Will, Naomi’s best friend. Will is quirky, confident, dedicated and sweet. He’s editor of the school yearbook, which is pretty much his whole life. I don’t know if yearbooks are really this big of a deal in high school or not but it seemed pretty insane to me! He loves music and is always making Naomi mixed CDs for every occasion, which I thought was really cute.

Besides the few main characters, the rest of them fell flat. Ace, Alice, and Yvette, were all underdeveloped and stereotypical.

I’m still excited to read Zevin’s newest book All These Things I’ve Done. Hopefully it will have more developed and complex characters and be a bit more exciting!