The book shifts gears for a third (and last) time toward the very end. The fact that Naomi had the gall to first fall in love with him and then practically devote herself to him made me lose what little respect I still had for her. James has every stereotypical condition that would cause a teenager to be labelled as troubled-depression, antisocial behaviour, obsession-you name it, he's got it. With the return of Old Naomi, this plot point gets lost in the shuffle, as Naomi now has to deal with the memory of Will kissing her even as she addresses her feelings for the school's 'troubled kid', James. Up until that point, we've gotten hints that she wasn't exactly the nicest girl at school but was apparently nice enough to be best friends with a genuinely 'nice guy', Will Landsman. Unfortunately, Zevin seems to focus on this byproduct while ignoring the end goal-the whole self-discovery thing. And not the funny-yet-vicious sort of drama I enjoyed watching in Tina Fey's Mean Girls no, this is the pointless-yet-ubiquitous drama created as a byproduct of our own struggle to discover who we are. If anything, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac remind me of why I'm glad my years as a teenager are coming to an end: way too much drama. So Naomi begins the book not-quite- tabula-rasa, and you expect her to grow and change as she becomes a brand new person, right? Not so much.

Zevin uses a good deal of creative license when it comes to Naomi's amnesia-which she's allowed to do, both because it's her book and we still don't precisely understand the workings of the brain anyway. The premise is interesting: Naomi Porter is a teenage yearbook editor who hits her head when she falls down the steps at her school, causing her to forget the last four years of her life.

While Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac isn't a terrible book, I finished it with a profound feeling of 'So what?' I'm not sure that was the right decision. After not enjoying Elsewhere, I was hesitant to read this book, but decided to go through with it anyway.

Memoirs of a teenage amnesiac summary