Esteemed Brooklyn Heights author explores memory, identity in latest novel
Brooklyn BookBeat
Seventeen-year-old Ember Leferrier is not your average teenager. The narrator in Adele Griffin’s latest Young Adult novel “Loud Awake and Lost” (Knopf), Ember has spent the last eight months in a hospital bed after a car accident nearly killed her. When we meet her, she is leaving the hospital, feeling “crudely refashioned, like a Frankenstein monster,” and heading home with her parents to Brooklyn Heights.
While her friends and family make every effort to help her heal and readjust to the stable life she once knew, Ember has trouble reconstructing her sense of self. Her memory of the weeks leading up to the accident has vanished, leaving her haunted. She develops a sneaking suspicion that the life she led just before the accident was different from the world she remembers, and while she yearns to reclaim the identity her friends and family are familiarizing, Ember can’t shake the feeling that there’s a part of herself she’s repressing.
Ember’s intimate encounters with Kai, an artist who hints that there’s a world Ember can’t seem to recall, further complicate the mystery — and eventually Ember questions her desire to uncover her thorny past.
Brooklyn Eagle recently checked in with Griffin, who shares with us why she loves living in Brooklyn Heights. She reveals her favorite Brooklyn bookstore and offers a preview of what she’s working on now.