Everything I Thought I Knew
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3.8 • 6 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A teenage girl wonders if she’s inherited more than just a heart from her donor in this compulsively readable debut. Seventeen-year-old Chloe had a plan: work hard, get good grades, and attend a top-tier college. But after she collapses during cross-country practice and is told that she needs a new heart, all her careful preparations are laid to waste. Eight months after her transplant, everything is different. Stuck in summer school with the underachievers, all she wants to do now is grab her surfboard and hit the waves—which is strange, because she wasn’t interested in surfing before her transplant. (It doesn’t hurt that her instructor, Kai, is seriously good-looking.) And that’s not all that’s strange. There’s also the vivid recurring nightmare about crashing a motorcycle in a tunnel and memories of people and places she doesn’t recognize. Is there something wrong with her head now, too, or is there another explanation for what she’s experiencing? As she searches for answers, and as her attraction to Kai intensifies, what she learns will lead her to question everything she thought she knew—about life, death, love, identity, and the true nature of reality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Sometimes things glass, eggs, hearts just break": that's what cross-country runner Chloe realizes when she collapses in her senior year and, diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, is told that she'll die if she doesn't get a new heart. Months after a transplant, she feels better physically but not mentally. Once a straight-A, type-A student, she's now stuck in summer school, has memories she doesn't recognize, and keeps dreaming about a terrible motorcycle crash. The only thing that feels right is her new hobby: surfing. She begins exploring transplant-related memory transfer and whether memory can live in a body's cells. Is that why she now knows how to ride a motorcycle and to get to places she's never been? Why she appreciates her summer school classmate, Jane, whom old Chloe would have disdained? As Chloe and Jane start sleuthing, Chloe and her surfing instructor, Kai, get closer, but is she risking her heart, emotionally and physically? Chloe and Kai's well-drawn ocean adventures are exciting, as is their burgeoning romance, and, though some readers may find the final plot twist hard to swallow, debut author Takaoka weaves a compelling tale of following one's instincts and for connections that outlast physical life. Ages 14 up.
Customer Reviews
Really Good
this book is super good and has an unexpected ending. never a dull moment.