Review of Secondhand Memories by Takatsu

Ah, the throes of teenage love.

Actually, maybe more like, uggg, the throes of teenage love.

It’s a bit hard to say which of the above paragraphs I’d slot Secondhand Memories into. Because while reading about teenage love is like watching a movie in Technicolor, it’s also like watching a movie in ultra-bright Technicolor, while hung-over, with a migraine, when workers are tearing up your street with jackhammers. Secondhand Memories wore me down. There’s just so much. Written as a cell-phone novel, none of the individual “chapters” are overwhelming taken on their own, a page at most, written in what almost feels like poetry. But there are like eight hundred of them. Eight hundred little, angst-ridden, teenager-problems, non-rhyming poems, which often repeat what the previous little, angst-ridden, teenager-problems, non-rhyming poem has just told us. Likely in a serialized form, this isn’t so grating: your phone beeps with a little dash of literature in your day, huzzah! But lined up the way it is, one after another, so much teenage angst. So much. So much much much much much much much.

The plot is pretty standard soap-opera. Boy and Girl fall in love. Something a bit spooky goes on. Then girl falls in coma. Boy doesn’t know what to do with his life. Meets another girl. Now what? Does he wait forever for Girl One (Coma) to wake up or move on with Girl Two? Boy, of course, has zero flaws, and the flaws he does have are those sorts of flaws wounded heroes have, which aren’t really flaws as much as attributes. There’s a cartoony villain and a whole roster of vaguely interchangeable friends. They go to Kyoto (where FamilyMart still owes me the 100 Yen I dropped in their ice cream freezer and couldn’t get out). They get almost-mugged by some Nazis. You know, typical. It doesn’t really matter. We’re about seven-hundred-and-ninety-eight little, angst-ridden, teenager-problems, non-rhyming poems too many to really matter.

It’s a diversion, like bad television. Not much more. You kind of get into the groove of it and then are too lazy to change to the channel.

Secondhand Memories by Takatsu went on sale December 24, 2014.

I received a copy free from Librarything in exchange for an honest review.