Teen Tuesday: Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takaoka

Image: Candlewick Press

Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takaoka. 320 p. Candlewick Press, October, 2020. 9781536207767.

Happy Tuesday! It's the last Tuesday of summer break! What will you be reading today? Sometimes arcs get buried and it takes me a really long time to uncover them. I'm so sorry it took so long to find this. Argh!

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.

Teen Tuesday and Audiobook Review: Five Feet Apart by Rachel Lippincott

Image: Simon & Schuster

Five Feet Apart by Rachel Lippincott. Unabridged downloadable e-audiobook. ~7 hours. Narrated by Joy Osmanski and Corey Brill. Simon & Schuster Audio, November, 2018. 9781534437357. (Review of e-audiobook borrowed from public library. Own hc.)

Stella is a high school senior who has CF, cystic fibrosis. She has managed her disease like a champ, even going so far as to develop an app to schedule her many meds and has achieved some online fame as a YouTube vlogger. She's also on the transplant list. 

Enter new patient and CF bad boy, Will, whose b-cepacia infection has knocked him off the transplant list. Now he's counting the days till his eighteenth birthday when he will cease all treatment and walk out of the hospital to live a little before dying. 

We all know where that's heading, don't we? I purchased this book as requested by a student. I had no idea this was a screenplay turned into a book. Teens who love sick lit like, The Fault in Our Stars (which I did not), and are not overly concerned with medical inaccuracies* (which drive me bonkers) or the use of tired romantic tropes will love this book. To be fair, my teenaged self would've loved this. I'm sure the movie had its fans who failed to notice the medical goofs and plot holes thanks to photogenic actors, swelling music, a cool soundtrack and lots of close-ups.

*OMG! The medical inaccuracies! These three were the most egregious among many. 

Girl with 27% lung function flying up four flights of stairs w/o O2? In what universe?

Girl with 27% lung function has infected g-tube and manages to keep it hidden from her doctor and nurses? Not a chance. 


Girl with 27% lung function undergoes surgery with general anesthesia and survives? Okay probable, but is transferred totally loopy from recovery to her room in a WHEELCHAIR? Patients are never released from the recovery room in a wheel chair or as out of it as this character was.