The Last Thing I Remember by Andrew Klavan

This book is one of my finds-of-the-year. (The Dickasons found it for me). Thanks, guys.

Now others can be thankful because another boy-friendly book has arrived on the scene: adventure, chase, bad guys, and karate heroes. My girls and I ate it up. The author is friendly to religion and loves his country. He might want to start writing college texts. Never mind; he’s too talented.

Our 17 yr. old hero goes to bed in his cozy home and wakes up strapped into a chair where it becomes quickly clear that he has been a victim of torture. How something can happen this rapidly is explained by memory loss: one year of his life is lost in his brain.

But he manages to escape, get to the good guys, only to find that they consider him a murderer. He was convicted of the murder of his former best friend. He has to dodge the clutches of the cops to clear his good name, only to find that in addition to the good guys being after him, so are the terrorists who were originally torturing him. In fact, confronting one of them face-to-face, he finds that at least a few terrorists consider him to be one of them!

In all the mayhem, there is some degree of violence. I still give it a solid safety rating because it is not gratuitous or graphic. It’s subdued considering the context and age-appropriate unless your child has never played a video game or seen much television. I would consider the ax-scene in Where the Red Fern Grows to be more disturbing than the blood-involved scenes in here.

SAFETY RATING: 3 Flags