“The mirror exposed time’s passage, yes, but it eclipsed her heart’s true mileage. The lined face, the extra pounds, the hair chemically treated to hide its gray. Each year the body was hers, but her mind was out of sync with her reflection Always playing catch-up, trying to rearrange the scrambled pieces of her life.”

Thank you Flatiron Books for gifting me a copy of OONA OUT OF ORDER by Margarita Montimore.

“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?”

I knew as soon as I read the synopsis of this novel that I would love it- but, I had no idea just how much I would love it. Oona was exactly the storyline that I was needing and I savored every page of this beautiful, masterfully crafted story about one woman whose life is completely out of order. 

I love a storyline that follows a character throughout the entirety of their life; it always encourages me that no matter how tough things can be, we will preserver. Even though Oona’s life is completely out of whack, she still manages to take it in stride. She makes some mistakes along the way but isn’t that the beauty of life? We make our mistakes and we learn from them. We appreciate the good with the bad. I truly admired Oona’s spirit and her ability to not lose hope. 

I was completely transported into the pages of this story and as much as I wanted to peek at what age Oona was jumping to next, I resisted and let myself fall into step right next to her. There were many times that I felt my heart break a little for Oona and the decisions that she had to make or the goodbyes that she never got to say. It truly made me stop to think about life and how fragile it is. 

I genuinely felt that this story is an ode to the fact that no matter how old you are on the outside, that it’s what’s on the inside that truly matters. No matter how old Oona ended up being, it was her soul that stayed young. 

I truly could’ve kept reading Oona’s story. When I got to the last chapter, I didn’t want it to end. I needed her to keep going and continue jumping through life so that I could have all of the missing pieces of her story. I would be ecstatic if the author wrote a second book— seriously, ecstatic. Hint hint, nudge nudge.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Margarita Montimore and Flatiron Books for sending me this beautiful book that I will be reading again. 

OONA OUT OF ORDER will be published on February 25, 2020, and is available for pre-order now.