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Noggin, by John Corey Whaley, had so much potential in its first few chapters.  It’s the kind of book that promises to sink its hooks into you, forcing you to read till the very last page.

But as I read on the hooks fell off, as did my hopes for the book.  It’s a great book at first with a plotline that screams that anything could happen but sadly, nothings does.

The book centers around Travis Coates, a 16-year old with terminal cancer that becomes part of a medical experiment to chop off his head and let his dying cancer-ridden body rot while his head is frozen in a process called cryogenics.  While this may seem interesting it’s really not, for the book was more about Travis’s ex-girlfriend than the amazing fact that he was brought back from the dead.

In my opinion Noggin was not worth the read.

Travis was dying, and was sick of living in a body that failed him more and more every day.  In a last attempt for his life he signed up for cryogenics and then let his body die.  Five years later Travis wakes up in Jeremy Pratt’s body.  But instead of appreciating a second chance at life, something everyone else would die for, he whines about how different everything is. Travis Coates is unbelievably selfish.  For someone who died of cancer it’s unbelievable how careless he is with his life.  The character was hard to like, but Travis Coates was amazing compared to his ex-girlfriend Cate who was even worse.

Cate cried every chapter she was in and was on all around emotional mess.  She never knew what she wanted, and even though she knew it was wrong to hang out with Travis when she had a fiancé she still didn’t stop.  Throughout the whole book Travis tries to reconcile with Cate by doing romantic gestures and kissing her when she’s not expecting it.  But none of them worked and each time Cate would cry and run away.

Although these two main characters were awful the supporting characters and Travis’s best friends Kyle and Hatton were not.  They were the only real highlight of the book providing some comic relief from the never ending love saga of Travis and Cate.

Noggin is 352 pages of teen drama, and not the good kind.  For a book with such an interesting summary it really let me down.  The only thing I can compliment the author on was Travis’s friends Hatton and Kyle who were real friends and actually seemed like real people.  But I cannot say the same for the character’s themselves.  It’s a shame the book went down the road it did because the cryogenics idea was really creative.

If you’re really feeling a book about pointless drama this is the one, but you’re better off watching Keeping up with the Kardashians because even that’s better than this book.