Disclaimer: I received this arc from the publisher. Thanks! All opinions are my own.

Book: Everything I Thought I Knew

Author: Shannon Takaoka

Book Series: Standalone

Rating: 3.5/5

Recommended For...: Contemporary ya lovers

Publication Date: October 13, 2020

Publisher: Candlewick Press

Pages: 320

Recommended Age: 16+ (slight gore, medical issues, romance)

Synopsis: Seventeen-year-old Chloe had a plan: work hard, get good grades, and attend a top-tier college. But after she collapses during cross-country practice and is told that she needs a new heart, all her careful preparations are laid to waste.

Eight months after her transplant, everything is different. Stuck in summer school with the underachievers, all she wants to do now is grab her surfboard and hit the waves—which is strange, because she wasn’t interested in surfing before her transplant. (It doesn’t hurt that her instructor, Kai, is seriously good-looking.)

And that’s not all that’s strange. There’s also the vivid recurring nightmare about crashing a motorcycle in a tunnel and memories of people and places she doesn’t recognize.

Is there something wrong with her head now, too, or is there another explanation for what she’s experiencing?

As she searches for answers, and as her attraction to Kai intensifies, what she learns will lead her to question everything she thought she knew—about life, death, love, identity, and the true nature of reality.

Review: For the most part this was an excellent book. I loved how the author approached dealing with young adult issues and I thought the strength of this book was the characters and the character development. The characters felt very realistic too and the world building was pretty well done as well.

The only low point was that the book was slow and really hard to get into. The book was good once I got into it but it drug for the longest time.

Verdict: it was good!