Noggin
By John Corey Whaley
(I give it 3 out of 5 "headless" stars)
“Noggin” is about a 16 year old boy, Travis, who was literally dying of cancer, so he and his family had his head cryogenically frozen with the hope that science would be able to reattach it to a donor body sometime in the future. That future was only five years later.
This book isn’t a sci-fi at all – the head transplant happened, was successful, and that was that. The story is much more about being a teenager who sort-of went to sleep one day, and sort-of woke up the next, but five years had passed. Travis and everyone he knows now has to deal with the issues of undoing their grief and moving-on, to adjusting to having the dead-kid alive and back in their lives.
The story is original and thought-provoking, as well as hilarious and emotional. As a reader, I enjoyed that the story was not about the medical or science parts of the head transplant at all, but more about relationships and learning how to accept change. Travis, the main character, is a pretty typical teen who is occasionally whiny and often short-sighted and selfish. His five years passed like a nap, when everyone else in his life has spent five years doing their best to grieve and move on – his parents, his best friend, and his girlfriend (who is now engaged to someone else) have grown and changed while Travis hasn’t at all (well, at least not mentally…he is in an improved, taller, cancer-free body).
The story had some good flashback chapters to Travis’s final weeks before sort-of dying the first time, and those were emotional and felt realistic. The rest of the story takes place over a few months after his awakening. The plot opens with a decent pace, with the beginning moving right along, but the middle seemed to last too long. The climax was quick and only a few pages long, which felt rushed and a little unsatisfying.
Overall, I really liked the ideas in the book. A reader in their teens might side with Travis, while adult readers will likely side with everyone else. (A blurb on the dust jacket of the hardcover compares Travis to Holden Caufield from “Catcher in the Rye,” which, I think, does something similar to teens vs adults.) A lot of the power of this story and the ideas it presents comes from the “what if,” or “How would I react?” factors. The characters (and the reader) are confronted with how they handle loss, letting go, nostalgia, and letting other people make their own choices.
I give this book 3 out of 5 stars for its intriguing concept and the emotions it brings, as well as the characters who are all likeable and mostly realistic. I didn’t like how the book ended so quickly, or how cliché the whole thing became. The author had an original concept that really could have taken off, but instead it turned into a get-the-girl-back story that felt so unimportant. Maybe that was the author’s point, though, for Travis to be just a regular 16 year old who’s still in love with the memory of 16 year old Cate Conroy – it makes for a good adventure for Travis, but as a reader, I just felt like the love story felt like so many other YA novels. By the end of the book, I was ready to be done. It already felt a little long, but the writing was pretty easy going. I think that the story could have gone a different direction, while still being a non-sci-fi YA novel, and being a lot more effective and thought provoking.
This book would probably appeal to boys and girls about equally, but the weird concept might deter some readers. I would recommend this book to people who like John Green or other modern, “edgy” YA authors who aren’t afraid of occasional strong language or crude humor.
As far as content goes, there is some sexual content and language that is best suited for older teens, but as far as many popular YA novels, the content in “Noggin” is relatively tame. There is a sub-plot dealing with a character’s sexual identity, though this sub-plot is kept appropriate for most readers.
