Lincoln Locke's fifteen-year-old life is turned upside down when he's thrust into bachelor-pad living with his father, after his parents' marriage breaks up, and into an exclusive new school. Crestfield Academy offers Lincoln a new set of peers - the cr me de la cr me of gifted individuals, who also happen to be financially loaded - and a place on the swim relay team with a bunch of thugs in Speedos. Homunculus, the little voice inside his head, doesn't make life any easier; nor does Lincoln's growing awareness of a genetic anomaly that threatens to humiliate him at every turn.
On a search for answers to big LIFE questions, he turns to the hallowed school library, where he spies a nineteenth-century memoir, My One Redeeming Affliction by Edwin Stroud, a one-time star of Melinkoff's Astonishing Assembly of Freaks. As Lincoln slowly reads this peculiar, life-changing book, the past reaches into his present in fascinating and alarming ways.
Ways that defy imagination . . .
Audacious, funny and wonderfully inventive, The Origin of Me is a song to friendship, to young love, to the joy of imagination, and to celebrating differences.
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This is one the most unusual coming of age stories I've ever read.
This, at times outlandish story, celebrates our differences in such a brilliant way. Our main character encounters so many problems you can relate to, but the way Bernard writes is imaginative and completely unique. - Kaitlyn (QBD)
Guest, 30/05/2020