Image: Candlewick Press
Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takaoka. 320 p. Candlewick Press, October, 2020. 9781536207767.
Teen Tuesday features Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takaoka. This first-person narrative features Chloe, a Bay area high school senior and over-achiever until she collapses during cross-country practice. She needs a new heart, so her life, senior year and college plans are put on hold when she is placed on the transplant list. She basically has to hope to stay alive until someone with a match to her dies.
Once she receives her heart, she finds herself plagued by bloody nightmares every night and "memories" of people and places. Her friends have graduated and are getting ready to move away to college while she's stuck in summer school catching up. She has been accepted to college, but needs to finish her senior year. She also begins to do un-Chloe-like things like driving too fast, lying to her parents to hang with a new friend and sneaking out to take surfing lessons with Kai, a half-Japanese surfer. She's definitely falling for him.
This angsty, realistic romance takes a bit of a sci-fi detour as Chloe researches parallel universes and cellular memory in an effort to understand her nightmares. Chloe also muses on the race to compete for the "best" colleges that high school readers will find relatable. Chloe's reliability as a narrator may be called into question and readers may need to stop to reread in their race to the climax in this satisfying read.
Once she receives her heart, she finds herself plagued by bloody nightmares every night and "memories" of people and places. Her friends have graduated and are getting ready to move away to college while she's stuck in summer school catching up. She has been accepted to college, but needs to finish her senior year. She also begins to do un-Chloe-like things like driving too fast, lying to her parents to hang with a new friend and sneaking out to take surfing lessons with Kai, a half-Japanese surfer. She's definitely falling for him.
This angsty, realistic romance takes a bit of a sci-fi detour as Chloe researches parallel universes and cellular memory in an effort to understand her nightmares. Chloe also muses on the race to compete for the "best" colleges that high school readers will find relatable. Chloe's reliability as a narrator may be called into question and readers may need to stop to reread in their race to the climax in this satisfying read.
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