North East Teenage Book Award

There are a whole host of book awards that are awarded across the country to various types of books and authors. In the last year I've had a couple of small groups of students from school involved reading and voting in the North East Book Award and the North East Teenage Book Award. I'm hoping to attend a meeting next week with a bunch of other school librarians where we'll put together the shortlist for this year's NETBA which will start in September. As a result I'm reading as fast as I can through at least some of the books on the longlist.

Last night I skipped through Kat Got Your Tongue by Lee Weatherly. I've enjoyed it and rather wish I'd had time to do it a bit more justice. Kat wakes up after a car accident with memory loss. She doesn't know who she is, doesn't recognise her mum, and has no recollcetion of a major falling out with her friends immediately before the accident. It's a cleverly told story with chapters alternating between Kat's narration as she readapts to life, and her diary from before her amnesia. The reader is left to piece together what dreadful thing Kat did to her friends just as Kat herself has to.

On a very similar theme there's also a book called Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin. It's a while since I read this one (and it's nothing to do with the Book Awards) but I'd would highly recommend it. Interestingly neither Naomi, the protagonist of this book, nor Kat are necessarily the most likeable characters before their memory loss, but seem considerably nicer people afterwards.