This book wrecked me on a Tuesday afternoon while I was designing wedding invitations for a couple I've never met, and suddenly I'm sobbing into my stylus because Oona Lockhart just woke up in a body decades older than her mind and has to figure out how to love people she hasn't met yet.
My heart. MY HEART.
What If You Lived Your Life Like a Shuffled Playlist
Here's the premise: Oona turns nineteen on New Year's Eve 1982, faints at midnight, and wakes up in her fifty-one-year-old body. Every year after that, she leaps to a random age. Not forward, not backward — just scrambled. She might be twenty-four one year, then sixty-three, then thirty-three. And she has to just... live it. Each time she lands in a new year, there's a letter from a previous version of herself with instructions, stock tips (seriously), and warnings she doesn't always follow.
What got me — what really, physically hurt — is how Montimore uses this premise to explore something I think about constantly as a first-gen kid who lost her abuela: the impossible distance between who you are inside and who the world sees. Oona is perpetually nineteen in her heart but wearing bodies that don't match. She falls in love with people she hasn't earned yet. She grieves relationships she can't remember building. There's this recurring thing with her mother, Madeleine, who ages linearly while Oona bounces around, and every time Oona lands in a year where her mom looks noticeably older, there's this gut-punch of recognition — time is passing for everyone else even when it feels like a fever dream for you.
Abuela would have loved this one. She always said time was God's cruelest joke. She would've clutched her rosary at the premise and then stayed up all night to finish it.
Brittany Pressley Made Me Forget I Was Listening to One Person
The narrator's voice is velvet and honey — but specifically, it's the kind of velvet that has texture to it, not the smooth generic kind. Pressley does something really smart: she keeps Oona's inner voice youthful and slightly breathless no matter what decade she's landed in, but she shifts the energy — more cautious when Oona's in her older body, more reckless when she's young. When Oona lands in her club kid era (the early '90s, neon everything, MDMA and warehouse parties), Pressley's delivery gets this giddy, almost manic edge. Then when Oona crashes into a year where she's dealing with the aftermath of a marriage she can't remember, the voice drops into something quieter. More measured. The melancholy just sits there.
I listened at 1.0x because I'm savoring, not speedrunning, and this book rewards that patience. There are moments where Oona is processing two timelines at once — what she knows happened versus what she's feeling for the first time — and Pressley holds both of those threads without letting either go slack. The comedic timing is solid too. There's a bit where Oona, armed with future knowledge, makes some very strategic financial decisions, and the way Pressley delivers those scenes — dry, almost conspiratorial — made me snort-laugh while Frida glared at me from the bookshelf.
The Part Where I Have to Be Honest
Okay. I can see why some people find Oona annoying. She makes the same emotional mistakes across multiple decades — trusting the wrong people, pushing away the ones who actually show up for her, chasing the version of life she thinks she should be living instead of the one she's in. And yeah, there are moments where I wanted to shake her. But here's the thing: that's the whole point? She's nineteen. She's always nineteen inside. She doesn't get the benefit of accumulated wisdom because she's living everything out of order. The growth isn't linear, and that's uncomfortable but it's also brutally real.
What I will say is that the plot mechanics are more convenient than airtight. The time-travel rules are deliberately vague — there's no sci-fi explanation, no paradox logic, just vibes and acceptance — and if you need your speculative fiction to have rigorously constructed systems, this is not your book. This is a rainy Sunday book. This is feelings dressed up in a time-travel costume. Jane Eyre operates in that same emotional register — all feeling, no apology for it, the kind of story where the interior life is the plot.
The pop culture references across decades are fun but sometimes feel like set dressing rather than texture. And at 11 and a half hours, there are stretches in the middle where Oona's year-hopping starts to feel episodic — like connected short stories rather than one propulsive narrative.
But then Montimore will hit you with a scene where Oona sees her mother's hands and realizes she missed watching them age, and I'm done. I'm just done. Four tissues. Diego jumped off my lap.
Who Gets to Ugly-Cry and Who Should Keep Walking
If you care about emotional resonance more than plot mechanics — hi, you're my people — this is going to hit you somewhere soft. If you've ever felt out of step with your own life, like everyone else got the manual and you're just improvising, Oona is going to feel like a mirror.
Skip it if you need hard sci-fi rules or if messy protagonists make you want to throw your phone. This isn't about fixing your life. It's about surviving it out of order.
The Kind of Book That Leaves a Bruise
I ugly-cried at least three times. I laughed out loud more than that. And when it was over, I just sat in my desk chair with my headphones still on, staring at a half-finished invitation suite, thinking about all the versions of myself I've already been and the ones I haven't met yet. This book felt like finding a letter from your future self that says it's going to be okay, but not in the way you think. And Brittany Pressley delivered that letter perfectly.
