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First off, let me say how impressed I am with your students’ takes on RESTART. I write my books primarily to be enjoyed, but to see readers so thoughtfully applying my work to their own lives is incredibly gratifying!

To your questions:

1) I agree that RESTART could absolutely have taken place in a high school setting. I might even have been able to explore the story and characters in different way if that had been the case. I chose middle school because – while I have written about high schools in the past – most of my recent work has been about kids that age. So when I began to brainstorm the plot line of RESTART, it was always set in a middle school.

2) Good guesses, but RESTART didn’t come from anything in my life. I was thinking about where our personalities come from – the nature versus nurture debate. And as a kind of “thought experiment,” I wondered: if your memory is wiped clean through amnesia, do you ultimately go back to the person you were before, or might you become someone totally different?

3) I love the multiple-viewpoint style of telling a story. A lot of my recent books are narrated that way. It doesn’t work for everything, but when it does, you can explore a store from every conceivable angle. I’m so glad it was such a hit with you.

Thanks again for your incredible responses to RESTART!

                                                                     ———Gordon Korman———-