Noggin by John Corey Whaley (review)

After fighting an increasingly hopeless battle with leukemia, sixteen-year-old Travis makes a radical decision to have his head cryogenically preserved in hope that technology will eventually allow him a new life with a disease-free body. A mere five years after his procedure, Travis is again awake and fully functional, attached to the body of a well-built sixteen-year-old body donor. Although to Travis the interlude feels like a brief sleep, his friends and family have come to terms with his absence and moved on with their lives; his best friend, Kyle, despite confessing to his dying friend that he was gay, has a girlfriend, and Travis’ own girlfriend, Cate, is happily engaged. Travis is resolute: he will confront Kyle about living a lie, and he will win Cate back. Even in a book more focused on the emotional repercussions than the physical, the complete lack of attention to the physical readjustments of Travis’ full-body transplant is odd and unimaginative, and Travis’ celebrity is also unrealistically downplayed. However, it is the single-mindedness and implausibility of Travis’s quest to force Kyle and Cate into acceding to his wishes that renders him oddly unsympathetic and the plot disappointing. Ultimately, the book fails to craft the conditions necessarily for reader empathy, and those interested in the possibilities of the topic should turn instead to Dickinson’s Eva (BCCB 5/89) or even Meg Cabot’s more recent Airhead (BCCB 9/08).