The Last Thing I Remember is about as suspenseful as the Griffin (a roller coaster at Busch Gardens) is when it is sitting at the top of the 90 degree drop.

Andrew Klavan did a wonderful job writing The Last Thing I Remember. He leaves you hanging at the end of each chapter, which I love. The story takes place in present day, when a boy named Charlie West wakes up strapped to a metal chair. He doesn't know how he got there, who the guys in the hallway were, or how long he has been there. He is c More...

Reviewed by Sally Kruger aka "Readingjunky" for TeensReadToo.com

How can a reader possibly pass on a book with a first line like this one: "Suddenly I woke up strapped to a chair?" THE LAST THING I REMEMBER is non-stop action from start to finish.

Seventeen-year-old Charlie West goes to sleep one night, and the next thing he knows, he wakes up battered and bloody just over a year later. He tries to piece together the memories of his last day as he sits strapped to a chair. He remembers getting up, More...

Andrew Klavan writes this amazing novel from the point of view of a young man named Charlie West. Charlie has woken up in a mysterious room where he finds himself strapped to a chair and covered in blood. He doesn't know why he is here. The last thing he remembers is being a normal teenage boy doing his normal routines. As the book progresses on, he keeps having flashbacks trying to remember how he got in this room, and why he is in so much pain. also, he finds out some things about himself that More...

Andrew Klaven is a screenwriter (Don't Say a Word, True Crime) and this book would make an excellent action movie. As a novel, however, I just couldn't get into it. The main character wakes up beaten, tied to a chair and with no knowledge of what has happened. The plot moves back and forth between present day and "the last thing" he remembers--a day in September when he performed a karate demonstration for the school, got the phone number of his dream girl and had an altercation with his former More...

Once I got past the first chapter or two, this book really took off--and I loved it! Quite the exciting page-turning thrill ride until the very last page. I loved the crazy-making sense of mystery. I loved Charlie's character, too. It was so refreshing to have an older teen boy protagonist who had such strong faith, morals, values, and love of his country and liberty. The karate was so fun, too! My son is currently taking karate and I really enjoyed all the details and the philosophies of a grea More...

Someone compared this to the TV series "24," only for teens. That's not a bad comparison. Non-stop action, inextricable crises that the hero somehow extricates himself from, and barely time to catch your breath before the next hopeless disaster strikes. Our hero, Charlie West, stands apart from many teen protagonists in that he is openly, but not heavy-handedly, a practicing Christian. His faith is such an integral part of him that he doesn't need to get preachy about it. Nor does it stop him fr More...

Genre: Thriller, Adventure, Mystery
Length: 339
Author: Andrew Klavan
Date started: November 4th
Date finished: November 14th

Charlie West is strapped to a chair. He has no idea what is happening. Is this all a nightmare? What was happening? Not knowing what to do, Charlie panics. He hears three men talking outside his door, talking about what they were going to do to him. “Kill him,” one of them says. He has to escape. He can’t die like this. What was the last thing he remembers? The last thing Char More...

Hmm. This book has the feel of a 'James Bond' kind of story, but with a teen as our protagonist. At 17, Charlie West already has a black belt in karate and a dream to be an air force pilot. He's living a fairly normal teen life, and then one day wakes up in an interrogation room after a round of torture...with absolutely no idea how he got there.

Most of this first book in the series involves alternating chapters of flashback to the last things Charlie remembers from his regular life...though Ch More...

This is one of the best books I've read this year! I not only loved that fact that it was an unpredictable mystery but that it dealt with moral issues.
Charlie's friend who is very disillusioned with life says to him 'You think, work hard, pray to God, respect your parents, love America, and everything'll be great .'

This is a key point. Things aren't great at all but Charlie has a moral compass and uses that along with the wise words of the people that have guided him in the past to navigate the More...

Charlie West is a teenage boy with a lot going for him, which he juggles alongside the teen angst of a crush on a seemingly unreachable girl, a hovering mom, and some conflicts with his own patriotism versus his history teacher's skepticism about American Exceptionalism.

He is the last one anyone would expect to wake up strapped to a chair with evidence of torture on his bloody arms and clothing. But that is exactly where we find him, and Charlie has no memory of how he got here or even where he More...

This book started out as a complete mystery to the reader. You knew just as much as Charlie knew through the first book. He woke up in a concrete room with no recollection of why he was there, who the men surrounding him were, or what they had planned to do to him. He was soon to discover that he had forgotten a whole year of his life. In that year ha apparently killed his friend, went to prison and joined a group of terrorists. Join Charlie West on his adventure to discover the many questions More...

This is the first book in at least a four part series, so perhaps many of my problems and concerns will be addressed in future volumes. That said, it is a fairly easy book to read, not very taxing on the brain, about a young man who awakens, strapped in a chair, and obviously the victim of torture. He eventually escapes, but while he is doing this, he goes back to the last day he remembers, and tries to piece it together, so that we get a strong sense of his life "before." It's not dystopian, or More...

The book The Last Thing I Remember by Andrew Klavan is probably one of the greatest books I have read all year. The type of genre this book would fall under would be adventure along with suspense. This is the type of book that would keep you on the end of your seat wanting to read more and more. It’s about a teenage boy named Charlie West who lives a normal life just like every other teenage boy would. He makes good grades, he has a black belt in karate, he even got the prettiest girl in the sch More...

Judged by a Cover: Exciting/ Done Already

The cover's exciting because it's kind of mysterious. Like, if you haven't read the back your kind of wondering what he's running from and what all the smoke is in the back round. But, I say it's done already because pratically all the books that are based on kidnaping or adeventure, the cover is someone running from something. I don't know... it may just be me.


What's Up?

Charlie West is a normal high school teenager. He goes to school, loves karate, and h More...

Charlie went to bed with a grin, staring at the phone number Beth had written on the back of his hand that afternoon at school. Charlie woke up beaten, burned and cut, strapped to a chair in a room filled with torture devices....a year later. What happened in that year? The police say Charlie killed his best friend, was tried and went to prison only to escape a few months into his sentence. A stranger with a familiar face says Charlie's a Homelander, an American terrorist recruited by Islamic ex More...

"I don't know who these guys are, or what they want, but I'm going to stop them". Ok, so this quote is from the movie trailer of Abducted, but I think it really reflects the vibe of the first 50 pages of this book (which is all I could stomach). The main character is supposed to be some ass-kicking agent with top secret jobs and he's only 17 years old, though he's conveniently forgotten that. I thought it was annoying when every teen book I read is from a whiny self-described loser's perspective More...

I, too, found this book on the shelf while waiting to be helped at the library. I was looking at the Gateway and Truman Award Nominee for 2011-2012 (a Missouri library thing). I saw this book, looked at the back, and thought it sounded interesting. I was hooked after the first chapter. I got it this afternoon around 2:30 and finished it at 11:45. It was all I could do not to get on GoodReads or Amazon to read about it!

The story is about Charlie West, a 17-year-old perfect academic and karate stu More...

The Last Thing I Remember is part of the Homelanders series. The story begins with the main character, Charlie West, waking up strapped to a chair in a locked room. He is hurt all over and a voice calls for his execution. Charlie tries to think of the last thing he can remember, when he was just a normal high-school kid. He remembers doing ordinary things, working on his homework, practicing karate, dreaming of becoming an air force pilot, and writing a girl's number on his hand. Unfortunately, More...

LAST REVIEW 1/19/11

This is one of my favorite book that i have read. This book is about a boy who gets taken over by some terorist, and he is not sure whats going on. This bhook goese every other chapter one weres hes at home and then two whats happing to him. This is a fiction. This smester i have read two non- fiction and the rest fiction. I never thought that i would read non fiction books because theyu did not intrest me. As i had to read a non fiction i found out that i like them more then More...

The Last Thing I Remember is about a boy named Charley one day wakes up to find himself tied up to a chair. He later finds out that a year has gone by since the last date he can remember.

Andrew Klavan is very serious in this book. There is basically no other emotion than pure stress. It sometimes is fine, but other times it feels as if the book needed a different emotion.

When Charley wakes up, a voice outside the door is telling people to kill him. With no idea why these people are trying to ki More...

The last day Charlie West can remember was a perfectly normal day. He was a regular high school kid doing regular things like his schoolwork, practicing karate, chatting with his friends, and getting nervous around the girl of his dreams. He was a good kid who listened to his parents, prayed, treated girls with respect, and loved his country. But now, Charlie has just woken up in a living nightmare. He’s strapped to a chair and covered in his own blood and bruises. Someone outside his torture ch More...

Charlie West is not having a good day.
Sheesh. He wakes up this morning, bloody and bruised, strapped to a chair and surrounded by gory instruments of torture. Not to mention the lack of coffee.
Then he escapes from a prison-like building only to fall headfirst into a twelve-foot deep hole. What's with that, huh?
West is a strapping young gentleman. He gets good grades and he has a black belt in karate. And he's been accused of murder.
Well, nobody's perfect, I guess.
The thing is, Charlie doesn't re More...

Charlie went to bed with a grin, staring at the phone number Beth had written on the back of his hand that afternoon at school. Charlie woke up beaten, burned and cut, strapped to a chair in a room filled with torture devices....a year later. What happened in that year? The police say Charlie killed his best friend, was tried and went to prison only to escape a few months into his sentence. A stranger with a familiar face says Charlie's a Homelander, an American terrorist recruited by Islamic ex More...

I read The Last Thing I Remember to see if I could recommend this book to some of the boys in my sixth grade class. The back cover makes it sound more horrific than it is, and the action will definitely grab them. I think that students will really enjoy the pace of the plot, and the main character. Charlie West is a martial arts black belt who wakes up one day strapped down to a chair where he had clearly been tortured. The rest of the plot is something like The Fugitive, where he has to clear h More...

Thoughts on the Overall Book: First of all, this isn't my normal kind of read, at least not the kind of stuff I have been reading recently, I used to be into the spy thrillers and all that, but this is probably the first contemporary book I have picked up in a long time that hasn't been a time travel novel or some kind of paranormal book. It was just one of those random books one picks from the library to "give it a go" and I'm glad I did because it was a really good book!

Writing Style: The auth More...

"Nie, niemals darfst du aufgeben, niemals, niemals, niemals -"

"Homelanders - Stunde Null" ist der Auftakt zu einer spannenden Action Trilogie um Charlie West.

Stellt euch vor, ihr geht eines Abends ganz normal ins Bett, und am nächsten Morgen wacht ihr auf, seid an einen Stuhl gefesselt und zwei starke Männer kommen auf euch zu, mit der Absicht, euch zu töten. Und ihr stellt fest, ihr habt keine Erinnerung an die letzten zwölf Monate. Genau das passiert Charlie.

"Ein Jahr war vergangen, seit ich More...

I love this book! Aside from good writing, intriguing plot, etc., what I found the most compelling thing about this book is that Charlie West is a good kid.
There's so many books out there for teenagers where the main characters have, to put it bluntly, lives that stink.
These authors write these books that are full of angst and the main characters have family problems, drug problems, problems at school, etc.
and these books get praised because "they're easy to relate to".
I hate books like that.
Now More...

You have 17-year-old Charlie West having a perfectly normal teenage life one day and then waking up in another place the next morning, strapped to a chair with bruises and covered in blood and hearing men outside the door being ordered to kill him. The first chapter drew me in right away, and I knew somehow I had chosen a good series to recommend to my daughters (even though it’s more for boys).

The plot is not an original one, but I still managed to find a clever imagination at work here, with s More...

Since the ratings on this book are rather tough to do, I decided to give this book only 3 stars (which, according to GR, means I 'liked it'.) I didn't 'really like it', so I couldn't give it a four.

This is the first book in the Homelanders Series. From the very first paragraph, you're attention will be grabbed as you read about Charlie West. He wakes up strapped to a chair, hurting all over, bruised, and sore. He looks over and sees torturing instruments on a table. Then, he hears voices outsid More...

In The Last Thing I Remember, Charlie West has been kidnapped and he can’t remember what happened. West can only remember doing homework the night before and then he went to bed. West is in high school and he is practicing karate daily. He has a secret dream of becoming an air force pilot someday. West also has a major crush on Beth Summers. The day before he was captured, West got up enough courage to ask Beth out on a date. When his life finally started looking wonderful something happened, an More...