Restart Study Guide

Gordon Korman was born in 1963 in Montreal, Canada. In 1970, his family moved to a suburb of Toronto, the largest city in Canada. In middle school, he took English from a track-and-field coach who allowed the students to work on months-long, independent creative writing projects. During that time, Korman wrote the manuscript of his first novel, This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, about two young pranksters at a Canadian boarding school. Korman decided to send his manuscript to the publishing company Scholastic, because he served as the Scholastic Arrow Book Club monitor for his class and so felt he had a connection to the publisher. Scholastic bought the manuscript and published his book in 1978, when he was a freshman in high school. Korman wrote and published several more novels while in high school. After his high-school graduation, he went to New York University, where he studied film and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1985. He has continued to produce novels at a brisk pace; as of 2023, he has written more than 100 novels for children or young adults. Currently, he lives on Long Island in New York.

The plot of Restart involves Chase Ambrose, the amnesiac middle-school protagonist, discovering that he stole a Medal of Honor from an elderly Korean War veteran named Mr. Solway. Japan conquered Korea in 1910 and ruled it until the end of World War II, when the global powers known as the Allies (e.g. the United States, the United Kingdom, and the USSR) defeated the Axis powers (Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan). From 1945 to 1948, the US occupied the southern part of Korea, while the USSR occupied the northern part. In 1948, these two zones became two nations, the capitalist South Korea and the communist North Korea. Each nation wanted sovereignty over the entire territory of Korea, and in June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. The ensuing conflict, called the Korean War, lasted from 1950 to 1953, during which time US soldiers fought on the side of South Korea. The Korean War was extremely brutal. In 1950, the US-backed South Korean government massacred tens of thousands—and perhaps hundreds of thousands—of its citizens on the suspicion that they were communists, carrying this out in the so-called Bodo League massacre. Meanwhile, North Korea tortured and killed prisoners of war. It may be due to the brutality of the war that Mr. Solway refuses to wear his Medal of Honor (a decoration given to only a little more than 3,000 soldiers in US history) and why he dislikes it when people call him a war hero.

Restart is, broadly, a novel about a middle-school bully who becomes kinder and more thoughtful, rejecting his place in the social hierarchy, after a head injury gives him amnesia. One famous and influential novel about adolescent social hierarchies is William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954), which is about schoolboys marooned on an island who try—and dramatically, violently fail—to organize themselves into a functioning community. Another influential children’s book whose protagonist participates in bullying is Judy Blume’s Blubber (1974), about a girl named Jill Brenner who helps her friends bully an overweight classmate until Jill, too, is targeted for bullying. Yet both The Lord of The Flies and Blubber represent social hierarchies and bullying prior to the advent of phone cameras and social media, whereas a major plot point in Restart involves its protagonist trying to take an embarrassing photo of his neighbor on his phone. A middle-grade novel in the same contemporary and technological milieu as Restart is Sarah Darer Littman’s Backlash (2015), which is about a girl whose crush bullies her over Facebook. Gorman Karman himself has also written several other contemporary novels about bullying, including Schooled (2007), a novel with a protagonist often too socially oblivious to realize he is being bullied.