2023/050: The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart — Margarita Montimore

...she tried to believe the future held better things than the past. Is this what it means to get older, replaying happy memories because the best times are behind you? [loc. 809]

Oona Lockhart's birthday is January 1st, so on the last night of 1982 she's expecting to celebrate both the new year and her 19th birthday, in the company of her friends, boyfriend and bandmates. But she's not feeling great: she faints... and wakes up in 2015, in her 51-year-old body: which her 19-year-old mind has some trouble coming to terms with. A young man named Kenzie claims to be her assistant, and tells her the huge, sophisticated house she woke in is her own home. Of course Oona doesn't believe him: but a frantic crosstown dash to her old haunts indicates that he might be telling the truth.

That first year's a bit of a nightmare. Her mother is around, and very supportive; Kenzie takes care of quotidian matters and provides company and guidance; future (or past) Oona wrote herself a letter, explaining the basics. But Oona, gradually accepting her mother's assurance that this will happen again and again, that she'll wake each New Year's Day into a different year, is miserable. How can she hope to live her life out of order, with nothing lasting? What happened to her old friends? What happened to her?

The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart (originally published as Oona Out of Order) covers seven out-of-sequence years of Oona's life, from 19 to 26 (or from 1983 to 2017). Like any good time-traveller, Oona has made some good investments and is wealthy in her own right: at least she doesn't have to deal with evolving workplace technology, or the lack of a feasible career ladder. But, despite her mother and Kenzie (who isn't always around, for reasons that become clear late in the novel), Oona is lonely. She still misses Dale, the guy she was seeing in 1982, and she still hopes to find love. But the primary focus is on her relationship with her mother, which is intense and sometimes difficult -- on both sides.

I enjoyed this, though as someone even older than the body in which Oona wakes in 2015, I was irritated by the implication that youth is best and ageing is awful. (On the other hand, I probably thought that way when I was nineteen...) Sometimes the message, of living in the moment and enjoying the good times while they last, was rather heavy-handed. But I liked the way that music -- especially Kate Bush's 'The Ninth Wave' -- was woven through the story, and I liked the ways in which Oona coped with, and even came to terms with, her condition, and how she explained it to others.

Fulfils the ‘Typographic cover’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.