Mom. Doesn’t she think I know my own mother?
“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” I bluster. “My mother is—my mother is—”
That’s when it happens. I reach back for an image of Mom and come up totally empty.
Ditto Dad or home or friends or school or anything.
This the premise, in a nutshell. Kid wakes up from coma in hospital and has lost all memory of his life to that point. Just like that, an entire life already lived gone with no opportunity to replace it. The only thing left to do is to start over. Or, put another way, to restart it. And this is what the narrative will proceed to detail. How one Chase Ambrose, bully extraordinaire, gets a second chance at becoming a good person. A tale as old as time in some ways, of course—more on that later—but also updated for the YouTube crowd. In fact, YouTube plays a significant role in the story although one does experience a nagging feeling at some points that an opportunity might have been wasted.
Video club is the one place that’s brand-new to me because it actually is.
Before the coma, Chase was an athlete who made fun of the video club. After the coma, he becomes a member of the video club. That membership becomes essential to the process of altering the reputation from his other life which keeps coming back to bite. The whole relationship between Chase and the head of the video club he used to bully but now helps out making videos is a nice way of seamlessly integrating YouTube and social media into the story to make it more relevant, but at the same time this very aspect becomes a gaping hole waiting to be filled.
Surely, at some point in the past someone in the video club actually must have filled Chase doing bad things, right? And if he was that bad of a bully in a school that actually does have a video club and all that Chase has to go for all the bad things he did is the memories of others, well, it just seems like a no-brainer to connect those things, right? If nothing else, it would surely seem as though the piano explosion would have been captured on video by somebody. With YouTube being so integral to the plot, the absence of a major sequence in which Chase is forced to actually watch documented video evidence of his past cruelty just seems inexplicable.
The Chase Ambrose I used to be never would have assembled such support. Mom and Dad. Johnny. Probably Aaron and Bear, who have to be worse than nobody as character witnesses. Maybe a few more teammates, out of obligation. That would have been the sum total of my cheering section.
After finishing this book, some readers will almost certainly stumble across a movie from the 1990’s starring Harrison Ford that tells a somewhat similar story. Except that the title character in Regarding Henry is already a middle-age adult whose loss of memory results from a brain injury after being shot. The basic premise is almost identical, however: Henry was not a school bully, but an all-around jerk in every aspect of his life. He is a successful corporate lawyer who job is crushing the little guy, he cheats on his wife, and is a first-class high functioning narcissistic sociopath. The message of both stories seem identical too, as do the underlying problem. They both want to become feel-good stories of the redemption of a bad guy. There is just one problematic element at play here: if you can’t remember being a bad guy, can you really be redeemed?
