Blog Tour: The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart by Margarita Montimore

Today is my stop on the blog tour for the brilliant The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart by Margarita Montimore!

Brooklyn, 1982. Oona Lockhart is about to celebrate her 19th birthday and ring in the New Year. But at the stroke of midnight, she is torn from her friends and boyfriend, finding herself in her fifty-one-year-old body, thirty-two years into the future.

Greeted by a friendly stranger, Oona learns that on every birthday she will enter a different year of her adult life at random. Still a young woman on the inside, but ever changing on the outside, who will she be next year? Wealthy philanthropist? Nineties Club Kid? World traveller? Wife to a man she's never met?

While Oona gets glimpses of the future and thinks she knows what's to come, living a normal life is challenging. As she struggles between fighting her fate and accepting it, Oona must learn to navigate a life that's out of order - but is it broken?

Review

The time-travel element of this book is what sold it to me - it sounded like such an innovative concept and I was intrigued to see how it would play out. The plot in a nutshell is this - Oona's life is out of chronological order. On the stroke of midnight every New Year's Eve she is transported to a random different year of her life, anywhere between 1983 (where the story begins on Oona's nineteenth birthday) and the present day. Backwards, forwards, old, young, new faces, old friends. All Oona has for guidance are vague 'no spoilers' notes left for her by her future self.

When she goes back in time Oona must remember not to divulge information about the future (ubers don't exist in the nineties!), and the landscape, technology and culture around her shifts drastically with every passing year. Not to mention her appearance. It's a lot to take in, for the reader as well as Oona, and we are as bewildered as she is every time she finds herself in new surroundings, trying to keep up with what's happening.  Each year brings its own surprises, not all of them good, and the more 'leaps' that Oona takes, the more she, and we, slowly start to make sense of her life. Whilst I did question some of Oona's actions, her flaws and mistakes made her human. She had to learn through experience and grow up, fast.

What really makes this book is its grounding in pop culture. There are music references everywhere - not only to reflect the years that Oona has travelled to, but also to create a sort of soundtrack to the book, to her life. Once I'd finished reading I immediately turned to Spotify to listen for myself. I've never listened to Velvet Underground before, and now they will always remind me of Oona.

So what's the moral of the story? That age is just a number? That you're only as old as you feel? To live in the moment? To cherish those you love, every day? All of these and more. The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart is a time jumping, mind bending rollercoaster of a novel. I adored it!

*Follow the blog tour for more content on The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart! Thanks to Tracy Fenton @ Compulsive Reads for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for a review!*