#BookReview: The Other Us by Fiona Harper

Summary:

If you could turn back time, would you choose a different life?

Forty-something Maggie is facing some hard truths. Her only child has flown the nest for university and, without her daughter in the house, she’s realising her life, and her marriage to Dan, is more than a little stale.

When she spots an announcement on Facebook about a uni reunion, she can’t help wondering what happened to Jude Hanson. The same night Dan proposed, Jude asked Maggie to run away with him, and she starts to wonder how different her life might have been if she’d broken Dan’s heart and taken Jude up on his offer.

Wondering turns into fantasising, and then one morning fantasising turns into reality. Maggie wakes up and discovers she’s back in 1992 and twenty-one again. Is she brave enough to choose the future she really wants, and if she is, will the grass be any greener on the other side of the fence?

Two men. Two very different possible futures. But is there only once chance at happiness?

Review:

This book was one of the more thought-provoking novels I’ve read in a long time. I enjoyed that we jumped right into the meat of the story right away – it doesn’t take long for Maggie to go back in time to her college days and start to try to right what she thought were her wrong choices. It was truly fascinating to see where her life was each time she “jumped” and how drastically different her life was based on the choices she was making. I felt anxious each time she found herself in a new life, trying to figure out what man she was with, if she had children, who her friends were. My only complaint about THE OTHER US is that it was very long. It took me almost five days to read this compared to my usual two, and that was with me constantly reading because I was enjoying the story. If it could have been trimmed down a tad I think I would give it the full 5 stars, but still – a really well-written, highly intriguing and thought-provoking novel that I would still recommend.

4.5 stars