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 traveler? 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. Surprising, magical, and heart-wrenching, Montimore has crafted an unforgettable story about the burdens of time, the endurance of love, and the power of family. - From Goodreads
Hardcover: 352 pages
Expected publication: February 25th 2020
Publisher: Flatiron Books
ISBN 1250236606
REVIEW
Oona Out of Order: A Novel by Margarita Montimore
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐💫
Question: If you could jump to any age and spend a year there, would you? What age would you choose?
“The mirror exposed time’s passage, yes, but eclipsed her heart’s true mileage. The lined face, the extra pounds, the hair chemically treated to hide the its gray. Each year the body was hers, but her mind was out of sync with her reflection. Always playing catch-up, trying to re-arrange the scrambled pieces of her life.”
Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore takes the concept of leaping into a different age but puts a completely different spin on it then I’ve seen in past books/movies. Oona never knows what age she’ll land in and this is what made the book so compelling to me.
Every New Year’s Eve on her birthday, at midnight, Oona will leap into a different age and she never knows when, where or what to expect. The only hint she gets on arrival to her new age is a letter that her present self writes to her leaping self. The letters are always a bit vague and without any real direction so Oona has to wing most of it.
Oona is 19 years old when she makes her first leap. She lands in her 51-year-old self with absolutely no idea of what’s transpired over the years. Watching Oona’s journey of self-discovery, her ability to make the leaping work for her financially and the fact that it’s almost impossible to change fate made this a page-turner for me. Throughout the book, Oona has few constants but one is her mother, Madeline, a free-spirited and sassy lady that I loved. Madeline’s story is a great secondary story aside Oona’s. I feel like I should also mention that there are impressive music references throughout the book and that Oona has kick-ass taste in music!
This is a fun story but along with this is heartbreak and sadness. It’s unusual concept, well-developed main character and secondary characters, and a plot that kept me turning pages made Oona Out of Order difficult to put down!
I highly recommend this to any fan of Contemporary Fiction with a side of time-travel.
A big thank you to Flatiron Books and Margarita Montimore for providing me with a physical copy of Oona Out of Order in exchange for my honest review.
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