Rating: 4 stars
Buzzword Title Challenge 25: Alliteration
Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Eyes
CBR17 Bingo: O (A book title that starts with O)
Official plot summary (because I read this back in July):
Just because life may be out of order, doesn’t mean it’s broken.
It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight, she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she’s told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year, she will leap to another age at random. And so begins Oona Out of Order…
Hopping through decades, pop culture fads, and much-needed stock tips, Oona is still a young woman on the inside but ever-changing on the outside. Who will she be next year? Philanthropist? Club Kid? World traveller? Wife to a man she’s never met?
Oona Out of Order is a remarkably inventive novel that explores what it means to live a life fully in the moment, even if those moments are out of sequence.
This is one of those books I bought in an e-book sale many years ago and then pretty much forgot about, until it fit into a bunch of my reading challenges this year. Based on the blurb, I wasn't entirely sure if this was going to work for me, but I was pleasantly surprised, and the author was able to sustain the high concept throughout the book.
So mentally and emotionally, Oona ages chronologically, but because of a strange wish she makes on New Year's Eve in 1982, she keeps being sent backwards and forwards in her own life time, and never knows if she's going to be younger or older, which people from her life will be around, how her relationships are going to play out and so on. Oona from the year before tends to write letters to give present day Oona advice on how to navigate her confusing existence from year to year. She has large ledgers locked up in a safe with stock market advice, to make sure that she always has enough money to live a carefree life.
Some years, she doesn't get the letter, or note, or advice until it's too late, and she may already have committed mistakes past her warned her about. In some years, she recieves bad news about people she cared about, and she quickly learns to avoid "spoilers", to keep her peace of mind. It can be a confusing, and occasionally depressing, way to go through her life, and some New Year's Eves, she is a lot more depressed than others. Other years, she can't wait to jump to a new experience.
This was only the second novel Ms. Montimore published, and based on this, I would absolutely consider reading more from her. She is a creative and entertaining writer.
Judging a book by its cover: The cut out segments of the woman's face would give me a headache if I looked at it too long. It's a striking cover, and the prominently staring eye is the reason I could use this for my Buzzword Cover Challenge. Looking at alternative covers on Goodreads, I also discovered that in the UK, this book has a different title, The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart. I wonder why they renamed it?
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
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