The Last Thing I Remember

Review: “The Last Thing I Remember” Andrew Klavan             

Weary, Tired, Alone.

Previously living the life of a normal teenage boy, Charlie West wakes up strapped to a chair in a foreign cell, but what is worse; he is covered in his own blood. Having no recollection of how he got there he expects to wake up to the sound of his mum telling him to get ready for school. How did his world change so quickly? Why is he covered in blood? How did he get there? How can he leave? How does he not remember this? With all these unanswered questions racing through his mind, Charlie doesn’t have time to answer them, as mysterious men lurk outside his cell, they had been ordered to execute him. In order to piece together how his life had gone so wrong, and to fix his current situation, Charlie must go through every last event in his last day as a normal teenager.

The opening chapters of the book compelled me to read “The Last Thing I remembered”. Starting with a terrifying scene you immediately sympathised with the character’s predicament. It is relatable in the way Charlie’s day to day life was described, with him socializing, doing homework, going to school, using his computer, just like a typical teenager. It raises the question in my mind of if I’m a normal teenager, just like him, couldn’t this have happened to me? This excites you even more to know how he will solve his bizarre situation.

Charlie is a good student with top marks, good friends, but he has an unusual ability. His drive and motivation comes from karate. Being very skilled and having a black belt, Charlie uses this as an advantage to escape his merciless captors and their orders to never let him resurface from the cell alive.

After being forced to run for his life, he is seen as an outlaw for reasons he can’t remember or comprehend. I nearly put down the book and stopped reading however through the fighting and action scenes as I found them dry and more directed towards teenage boys than girls.  My curiosity to find out how this all happened got the better of me and I persevered.  I was then rewarded with a better insight into what happened the day before. Recounting his memories of a karate demonstration in front of the school, talking to the girl of his dreams and a nasty argument with an old friend.

I wasn’t fond of the writing style that Andrew Klavan had chosen. Some of the wording did look like a teenagers scattered brain and the random memories popping up in Charlies head had me thinking “How can Charlie concentrate on escaping, when he is having peculiar flash backs at the same time?”

The end of Part 1 in “The Last Thing I Remember” really had me hooked on what would happen next, being such a shocking change in events. It left me with more questions as to what was really going on.

The last two chapters were truly thrilling to read, almost as if you could feel Charlie’s adrenaline seeping through the pages. Though it was an engaging story, it never answered the main mystery of what had happened for him to end up this way. For someone to appreciate the full story, they would need to read the whole “ Homelander” series. Overall it was a thrilling and intense book to read, though it was a little too easy to read.