Blackout

Gr 8-10–Allie awakens in a small town Canadian hospital with zero recollection of how she got there or even who she is. Receiving a guided tour of her life, she must surmise exactly what sort of person she might have been before. The more she studies photos and how people interact with her, the bigger the hint that she really wasn’t a nice person. It seems like she may have been a party girl with little regard for the feelings of others—the sort who might cheat on her own boyfriend with her sister’s live-in boyfriend—and the sort who might stage an accident to cover up an attempted murder. Complicated friendship and love triangles abound with perhaps too many characters too difficult to distinguish from one another; a mostly white cast doesn’t help this. Parker and James are described with dark skin and dark hair, but like many in the text, they aren’t very fully drawn characters. Amnesia serves initially as a clever plot device, allowing Allie to take a voyeuristic look at her own life and allowing flashes of memory to illuminate the evening leading up to her accident. Ultimately, the narrative wraps up too abruptly as though the author grew weary of dripping out the details at such a slow trickle, and couldn’t resist pouring out the whole bucket all at once.