One to remember

One of my favourite films is MEMENTO, in which the main character played by Guy Pearce suffers catastrophic amnesia and some pretty dramatic consequences. It’s a gripping thriller, even if it is utterly preposterous. A far more credible picture of amnesia emerges from Lee Weatherly’s young adult book KAT GOT YOUR TONGUE, and it’s just as riveting without having to resort to violence and skulduggery to make its points. The blurb on Amazon says it’s about ‘how amnesia can affect a family’, but thankfully this isn’t the case; memory loss of this kind is so rare that it couldn’t really serve as the basis of a teen novel. No, what this book does is use amnesia as a dazzlingly inventive way of painting an extraordinary character and her deeply moving story.

Here is the review I posted on Amazon UK:

Who are you if the person you were has disappeared? KAT GOT YOUR TONGUE is guaranteed to grip anyone who has ever looked in the mirror and wondered who exactly is staring back.

This tale begins with the main character being run over, and then gets more nail-biting. Although the heroine’s amnesia is what creates the mystery and drives the plot forward, the story is really about more universal things: friends and family, love and hate, discovery and loss and redemption. It’s also about the awful gulf of communication between parents and their kids, or between friends, and how neither seems able to understand the other, and how much better it could be if only we talked.

Don’t expect a typical teens-with-problems yarn. It’s effortlessly page-turning, yet you may have your brain tied in knots by some pretty deep questions. Even as the twin narratives race head-on towards each other, you are forced to ponder what ‘me’ really means. At the heart of this book lurks a maddening mystery: Is the person we think we are just a story we tell ourselves?

The narrator – who is really two narrators – is great company throughout, even when she’s at her most unpleasant. At times she’s more of an anti-hero, by no means a ‘nice person’ in the usual sense. The fact that she remains sympathetic even when she (in her own words) ‘totally loses it’ is part of what makes this book so special. Her bad behaviour is shown to come more from sadness and fear than from malice. Kathy and her alter-ego Kat pass the main character test with flying colours: you desperately hope she’s going to be all right.

Teenage girls will devour this book. Anyone who isn’t one (and I never was) should check it out too. It’s great fun, a perfect balance of darkness and humour, and a powerful tale about what it means to be the most extraordinary thing in the world: a person.