Gabrielle Zevin: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Ah! This book is amazing! This is one of the best books I've read in a really long time, not a misstep or a false move in it. Wonderful!

I was just thinking about how so many YA books are about figuring out who you are. And then I just read Emily the Strange, which is about an amnesiac 13-year-old (though we could talk all day about whether what happens in that book really happens, or whether the heroine goes crazier and crazier all throughout, building a world out of the pieces that come to hand...) and of course I've recently read Gabrielle Zevin's Elsewhere, about the same theme.

Is YA about figuring out who you are? Or becoming who you are? Maybe. I really loved how this book framed that whole question in terms of remembering who you are, rediscovering it.

Figuring out who you are isn't just about knowing it but doing it, actually making it happen, letting go of the things that don't work anymore, and opening up to things that are really yours but that you're scared of.

Lovely book. Highest recommendation!