If I Could Turn Back Time

A wealthy financier, unhappy with her loveless state, hits her head and wakes up back in high school, with a chance to rewrite her future. Drinking champagne on a yacht during a party off the coast of Florida, Ramie Phillips knows she has an enviable life. And yet....When a friend announces her pregnancy and best friend Sammy confesses he and his partner are ready to adopt, 38-year-old Ramie wonders how long her job can replace everything else. Drunk and morose, she hits her head while diving overboard and wakes up in the bedroom of her family's Potomac house, 18 again. After the initial shock, Ramie digs into teenage life, now that she knows how it will all turn out. There are the inevitable victories of being 38 in an 18-year-old's body: telling off the mean girls, guilt-free sex with your teenage boyfriend, appreciating youth instead of trying to escape it. And then there's Ramie's father, still alive and well, even though she knows he'll die of a stroke in two years. Ramie isn't very interested in wielding her power (aside from asking her dad to quit smoking or assuring bestie Tanya her latest crush isn't "the one"), focused as she is on her own fears of ending up alone at 38. Instead of breaking up with Brendan as she did the first time she was a teenager, what if she did things differently? The next time she wakes up she's 26 and living an entirely different life than the one she had (no London School of Economics, no brunches in Manhattan) and is instead pregnant-and by all accounts, miserable. But this is not the end of Ramie's journey, which goes somewhere countless other alternate-reality fictions have gone before. The fun of Harbison's (Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger, 2013, etc.) conceit is overshadowed by its cliched ending. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2015
On her thirty-eighth birthday, Ramie Phillips wakes up as an 18-year-old. At her birthday party the night before on board a boat off the coast of Florida, a friend's pregnancy announcement had Ramie second-guessing her decision to focus on her finance career instead of having a family. Now she has the chance to see whether things could have gone differently with her first love, Brendan. Readers watch her relive her life and try to determine if another path would have led to happiness. Is this a time-travel tale, or did something happen to Ramie during that not-fun party that put her in an altered state? Will her redo interlude help her find the fulfillment she craves? Reader favorite Harbison (Driving with the Top Down, 2014) infuses the story with wit and heart even though the premise of trading places in time is well trod. High-school high jinks and the search for meaningful love make this novel both lighthearted and poignant.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2015

Imagine waking up in your childhood bed and realizing you are 17 years old again. Thirty-six-year-old Ramie Phillips experiences just that in Harbison's latest (after Driving with the Top Down). Despite a successful career and devoted friends, Ramie realizes that her life has never felt complete and drinks her worries away, only to wake up in the past. But why the time loop? Determined to make better choices the second time around, she spends more time with her now-deceased father, tries to appreciate the innocence and freedom of youth, and gives her high school boyfriend another shot at long-term love. But when she wakes up in yet another alternate universe where she is older but living under very different circumstances, she begins to understand that fate works in a mysterious way. VERDICT The time-loop phenomenon is nearing ubiquity (Groundhog Day, Ken Grimwood's Replay, Richard Lupoff's 12:01 PM, Andrea Lochen's The Repeat Year), but Harbison delivers a worthy read. Ramie is relatable and endearing and offers everyone a chance to think, "what if?" [See Prepub Alert, 1/25/15.]--Chelsie Harris, San Diego Cty. Lib.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2015

At 36, Ramie Phillips has earned a fortune and hangs out with the rich and reasonably famous--not that she's happy, really. Then, as she dives into the pool while aboard a yacht off the Florida coast, she clobbers her head on the board and wakes up at age 18, with her mother yelling at her to get up for school. Let's see how the popular author fires up this popular premise.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.