BOOK REVIEW NOGGIN by John Corey Whaley By Stephen Bridge
A
nearly brilliant teen novel about a young man returning from cryopreservation, with a stellar main character and a level of reader empathy that I have rarely felt in a teen book. (Whaley’s first novel, Where Things Come Back won the Michael Printz Award for best Young Adult novel.) Dying of leukemia, 16-year-old Travis Coates and his family agree to an experiment, where his head will be removed and cryopreserved, in the vague hope that someday there will be a way to revive him and give him a new body. Unexpectedly, medical advances are made in only five years—and Travis is revived with his head transplanted onto the body of another young man who died of a brain tumor. Great, right? But Travis is still 16. From his point of view, he went to sleep one day and woke up the next— and his best friend and girlfriend and parents are now 5 years older. He is still stuck returning to high school as the freak “miracle boy.” His girlfriend is engaged to someone else. His parents threw out all of his stuff, except an urn full of his ashes, and they are keeping other secrets from him. Life is weird and seems completely out of his control. There are a lot of crappy books about cryonics and only a few good ones. Many of us have been influenced by the books we read, especially while we are young. We can hope that good books with a positive cryonics theme will penetrate the culture and get young people to think that joining a cryonics organization is the normal thing to do; but how do you find these books? This is definitely one of the good ones, exceptionally so in one of the most important ways—building empathy for a character that makes decisions we see as positive. The book is written in first person and that voice really makes the story work. Travis is bewildered, scared, self-centered (teenager, right?), and determined to make everything work again, including trying to get his now 21-year-old girlfriend to break off her wedding plans and marry him instead. All of the emotional details are right. Meeting his formerly younger but now older cousins, dealing with fan mail and hate mail, talking with the older man who is so far the only other survivor of this procedure, naively assuming that older friends still want to hang out with him. And it’s not just HIS details which are right, but also those of his parents and friends, who lost him from their lives and grieved and now have to adjust to him being there again. There are terrific 42
confrontation scenes where his friends and family struggle to articulate the emotions they feel and Travis’s 16-year-old self struggles to understand people who have lived 5 years of both grief and change after his “death.” This is intensified by our own adult understanding that the years between 16 and 21 normally produce more change than any other period in our lives. Noggin is often very funny, always thoughtful about the consequences of this particular situation, and ultimately deeply moving, as Travis starts to appreciate that this is a second chance at life, even though it won’t be the SAME life. Terrific writing; I don’t know if I have ever read a teen character that felt more like “that could have been me.” Nothing about the attitudes or characters feels false. Yes, it is unlikely that a person would only be cryopreserved for five years; but this time period is one that the author can make his points with. Also, the audio book by Kirby Heyborne is especially well done. There were two aggravating errors early in the book that led me to say “almost” brilliant. These were errors that fifteen minutes on the Internet could have corrected. Whaley persistently calls the procedure “cryogenics” instead of “cryonics.” [“Cryogenics” is the general branch of science which studies the technology of producing and using ultra-cold temperatures. “Cryonics” is the speculative medical technology being used in this book.] There
Cryonics / July-August 2016
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