Noggin

By John Corey Whaley

Listen - Travis Coates was alive once and then he wasn't.

Now he's alive again.

Simple as that.

The in between part is still a little fuzzy, but Travis can tell you that, at some point or another, his head got chopped off and shoved into a freezer in Denver, Colorado. Five years later, it was reattached to some other guy's body, and well, here he is. Despite all logic, he's still sixteen, but everything and everyone around him has changed. That includes his bedroom, his parents, his best friend, and his girlfriend. Or maybe she's not his girlfriend anymore? That's a bit fuzzy too.

If the new Travis and the old Travis are ever going to find a way to exist together, it looks like there's going to be a few more scars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: Jul 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781471122903

John Corey Whaley

John Corey Whaley grew up in Louisiana. His debut novel, Where Things Come Back, was the 2012 winner of the Michael L. Printz and the William C. Morris Awards. You can learn more about him at JohnCoreyWhaley.com and follow him on Twitter: @Corey_Whaley.

Reviews for Noggin

[chrisweir-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting read. A 16 year old boy, Travis, has just awoken to find his head on another person's body. He was dying of cancer and chose to have his head cryogenically frozen. He is now alive again with his head transplanted onto the body of someone else. The book has Travis trying to get his life back to normal but to everyone around him he's been dead for 5 years. All of his friends are now in their twenties and Travis is still 16 without even a license to drive. Travis leans towards the selfish side but he's been through a lot. But so have those he left behind. At the end he learns to start letting go of the past and learn to live his new life.

[rdwhitenack · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Decent book. Relatively clean in language. Hard to draw parallels to other similar books, but perhaps Frankenstein would be a good comparison.

[englishhudson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cancer threatened to take Travis Coates's life. Cryogenics saved it. At 16 years old, cancer permeated Travis's weak body. When he was offered the opportunity to volunteer for a cryogenics experiment, he quickly agreed. For Travis, it meant going to sleep one day and waking up another with a donor body attached to his head. For everyone else in Travis's life, he died and was gone from them for five long years. They grieved his death and continuing living. Imagine Travis's disappointment when he awakes to find his friends are now 21 years old, and his girlfriend is engaged to be married. Despite the serious nature of Travis's circumstances, he handles his second chance at life with humor and optimism.

[bdartnall_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A great read, albeit the slightly icky premise: modern medicine (via the Saranson Center for Life Preservation) successfully attaches a cryogenically preserved head onto another person's body and resuscitate him? It happens to Travis Coates, a sophomore in a Kansas City surburb whose body was dying (cancer) but agreed to be a guinea pig for the medical scientists' developing cryogenic science. Five years after his head is detached from his body, is frozen, and then brought back, attached to another young man's body, Travis has literally come back from the dead, five years later. Whaley's expert mix of scientific facts, teen life, all undergirded with both humor & empathy for all his characters makes this quirky story work. Loved it - GREAT choice for fans of John Green's The Fault in Our Stars - with a male protagonist. No wonder it was nominated for Evergreen Book Award this year.

[katielibrarian · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

this was so good. I have wondered how I would booktalk this book though?

[mirandalg14 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting concept, although I have seen similar things done before in other sci-fi books. While not horribly written, I didn't really connect with the characters enough to really care about them.

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

teen fiction. A 16 y.o.'s cryogenically-frozen head is attached to donor body, he wakes up 5 years later to find his friends are in college and his girlfriend is engaged to someone else. Really, that is all you need to say if you want to book talk this to a teen. Parental note: there is mild swearing in here, but it stops short of the f-bomb. Diversity points for Travis' best-friend-from-before being incidentally gay.

[fionaanne · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

For such an interesting premise, this was a remarkably boring tale.

[readingbeader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Noggin is this year’s Fault in Our Stars for me. A touching, poignant cancer story with a twist. You have to suspend belief to believe that Travis’ head could be successfully transplanted onto someone else’s body but that gimmick is an amazing way to look at how we deal with grief and growing up.

[amydelpo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful premise and opening chapters, but it doesn't hold together very well. Still, it reads like realistic fiction, and for people who love John Green and want something to read next, this is not a bad rec. There's mention of sex and drinking, but nothing graphic or awful -- okay for sixth grade on up.

[lilibrarian · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Travis is dying of cancer, and decides to have his head frozen in case science enables full body transplants in the future. Five years later, he is back, his head attached to his new body. The world has moved on without him, just enough to keep him off-balance and out-of-sync with his family and old friends.

[4hounds · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loved this. The sense of humor, the way the author put me in Travis's shoes - five years felt like a nap...the world was almost exactly the same, which made the differences so devastating. The respect for all the characters, even minor ones, in that they were not just one-dimensional. Really, really loved it!

[christianr_899499 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book shouldn't have worked because the premise really is ridiculous -- a teen whose body was dying was given a chance at life by having his healthy head severed from his body and preserved until a healthy donor body could be found and attached. It worked! He, his family, and his friends were told it would be many many years before the technology would be developed to attach the head to a donor body, but in the end it only took five years. The silliest thing to me was that his head was attached and then the medical part of the story was done -- he was sent home to live and return to school. But the brilliant side of the story was that while five years had passed, it seemed to Travis that he just woke up from a nap. Suddenly his friends were five years older, his girlfriend was engaged, and ultimately he discovered that his parents had been divorced for three years -- they tried keeping their divorce a secret from him but he found out. Suddenly this opportunity to live was confusing and maybe not 100% a good thing for him or people who loved him. By creating this nutty situation, the author gently introduces teen readers to a variety of existential questions that have no clear-cut answer.

[eheinlen_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The concept for this book was interesting and it was interesting to see how each person dealt with Travis being alive again. However, the ending left you wondering where the rest of the book was as there was no closure.

[mamzel_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was definitely one of the most unusual and hard to describe books I've read.Travis was fifteen when he contracted a deadly form of cancer. Upon his 'death' his head was removed and cryogenically frozen. Five years later it was reattached to the body of a boy who had died of a brain tumor. Unlike a story where the protagonist was in a coma and his friends and families paid regular visits to his bedside, Travis was gone. They had all said goodbye to him, grieved, and moved on. But when he came back he was ready to pick up just where he left off. Things just didn't work out that way.The thing that makes Travis so likeable and not pitiful was his sense of humor. He could kid about his condition at times when everyone else was extremely uncomfortable, hiding truths from him, or just finding it hard to face him again after saying goodbye.This book was not so much science fiction as possibly a science drama. Sense of humor without laugh out loud moments. Carrying on that is mistaken as bravery cause, what's a guy to do any way? Consequences of medical breakthroughs are not always completely thought out and are pushed out without giving thought to the individuals involved.

[laneliterati · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Noggin was fantastic and John Corey Whaley is amazeballs. I was expecting funny, and while the book has a lot of humor, it is surprisingly touching and powerful. Travis dies at age sixteen of leukemia, but he volunteers for an experimental cryogenic procedure and wakes up five years later with his head attached to the body of someone else (another teen with a terminal illness who donated his body to the project). Sounds crazy, right? And while it is pretty off-the-wall, it packs an emotional punch as it explores what the process is like for his parents to have their son brought back from the dead after grieving him for five years, and how painful it is for Travis to see that his friends have grown up and left him behind. It's joyful and awful and just a fabulous read.I would recommend Noggin to fans of John Green (especially The Fault in Our Stars) and Whaley's other book, Where Things Come Back.

[rvhatha · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"What's the point of getting another chance at life if everything's going to be so different I can't stand it?"This is the existential conundrum at the heart of John Corey Whaley's new novel, _Noggin_, the strangely touching tale of 16-year-old Travis Coates, who "was alive once and then wasn't," but is alive once more after his cryogenically preserved head is grafted to a donor body from another teenage boy. Travis had terminal cancer that didn't affect him from the neck up; Jeremy Pratt had a fatal brain tumor that didn't affect his body. Five years after his "death," Travis wakes up to find himself back in the land of the living with someone else's healthy body but a head full of fresh memories that are ancient history to those who've grieved for him and tried to move on.Imagine it: to you, it seems like you've just woken up from a nap, but in the meantime your friends have graduated from high school, found a way to overcome your loss, and are wrestling with college classes, jobs, and adult relationships. Whaley does an amazing job of balancing the humor of this absurd situation with its angst here, often moving seamlessly between these modes in a single paragraph. He gives Travis a completely believable voice, and even though we as readers can see that Travis is on a slow-motion collision course with reality, we can appreciate why it would take a long time to accept the changes in his life and in himself.There are some beautiful passages here about the nature of grief and loss, and I'm really earnest when I say that they're thoughts that only a reanimated 16-year-old could express so clearly...for example:"No matter how often you see or talk to someone, no matter how much you know them or don't know them, you always fill up some space in their lives that can't ever be replaced the right way again once you leave it.""Maybe we all just exist, all versions of us exist at all times, and we have to figure out a way to get to each of them, to find each one and tell that version that it's okay, that it's all just the way it works, a concept too powerful to ignore but too complicated to explain."This book is far more than the sum of its parts (pun intended)! Knowing the (admittedly far-fetched) premise of the novel, I expected humor. What I did not expect was to feel so deeply for and with the protagonist, and to be moved both to laughter and to tears. This will DEFINITELY be on the required-reading list the next time I teach the YA lit class.

[brainannex · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

There are so many people who are going to love this book. I'm not one of them. I should have stopped reading it. I hate to say why because of the spoiler-y nature of my dislike but suffice it to say I have a lot of lenience for main character's who have a blind spot, are unreliable, etc. This main character stretched my leniency to its limit.

[rosa.mill · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought that this would be a comedy. The cover gives off the silly vibe and the idea of someone being cryogenically frozen always leads people to giggles. Then I started reading it and the Frankenstein's monster parallels that I had heard about made a lot more sense (beyond just the people made from parts bit). The bulk of the book is spent on Travis trying to adjust and find a place for himself. Everyone had 5 years without him and they are just in a very different place in life. It can be painful to read at times but in a very real way and this is where it feels like the author really succeeded. I can't imagine any of these events, reactions and feelings going down any differently.

[kdf_333_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

this is about a kid whose head was cryogenicaly frozen and 5 years later he woke up with a new body. to him it was only yesterday. lots of things have changed. it's a great book about relationships with a very unique perspective. how do you relate to a person you thought of as dead for 5 years and how do you relate to people when no time has passed for you at all?

[cay250 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Travis Coates has his head surgically removed and cryogenically frozen after he dies (of leukemia at age 16). Unlike Williams, Travis is a fictional character, and five years after his death, technological advances allow doctors to attach his head to a donor body that’s taller and more muscular than the original. Whaley’s second novel (following his Printz-winning Where Things Come Back) is far more concerned with matters of the heart than with how head reattachment surgery would work. Travis awakens to restart where he left off—sophomore year—but everyone he knew has moved on. Best friend Kyle is struggling through college; former girlfriend Cate is engaged to someone else. As only the second cryogenics patient successfully revived, Travis is in uncharted territory; he’s “over” high school, but not ready to be anywhere else. Travis’s comic determination to turn back the hands of time and win Cate’s love is poignant and heartbreaking. His status in limbo will resonate with teens who feel the same frustration at being treated like kids and told to act like adults."

[brangwinn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

On the short list for the National Book Award, this YA novel is original. If you are a fan of Fault in Our Stars this is a book you should consider reading. Told in first person, it is the story of Travis whose head was frozen cryogenically and his body cremated in preparation for a time surgery could allow his head to be attached to a donor body. Five-years later, Travis returns to life, but it is so different. His best friend is in college. His girlfriend is engaged to another guy. He’s stuck in high school with a body that isn’t his. Creepy, funny, sad, poignant all these words can be used told describe his second life. This is an excellent choice of the National Book Award short list.