Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore

 

You look at this cartoon cover of a woman whose head is broken into six slightly askew pieces and her mouth open.  You think this is probably some whimsical rom-com dressed up in a contemporary literature package.  You assume it will be a light-hearted comedy.  You would be completely misled. 

Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore is the author's sophomore novel. Both of her books rely heavily on themes of memory, or lack thereof.  In this one, Oona is about to celebrate her nineteenth birthday, she has her whole life ahead of her and many important choices to make. Should she go on tour with her band? Go to London for a study abroad?  Suddenly she finds herself in her own fifty-one year-old body and every year on her birthday she hops to her own life in a different year.

It is a relatively engrossing read.  You turn the pages because you want to know what happens next. At the same time, every time I would put down the book, I would ponder the book and then I ended up with a series of gripes that all come down to time travel is too confusing for me to wrap my brain around.  

Most importantly to me, this book dives deep into the idea of predeterminism. There was nothing Oona could do in her life to change outcomes that she already knew about.  She didn't want to wake up on the subway one year, but she did, even though she tried to change it.  However, she has a binder that tells her what stock options to buy so that she won't have to worry about money?! I am so confused by the rules of time travel, as I always am.  On one hand, Oona should stay out of the limelight because her money could make her a target, but on the other hand, couldn't she just get a job like the rest of us normies?  I find the whole thing confusing.

Also, you know that I'm sort of prudish about what goes into my body, right? No drugs, no alcohol, no processed meat from Hormel?  I recently got a bunch of downvotes on what I thought was an innocuous reddit comment about how I didn't listen to a podcast because the frequent discussion of casual drug use was off-putting to me.  Anyway. The casual drinking, drug use, and unprotected sex in this book caused me great anxiety.  Oona is not a character I resonate with because her lifestyle is so far removed from my own. Many criticisms of this book are that the main character is emotionally unavailable to us as readers and I guess I buy into that a little bit. I didn't understand her choices, both because I wouldn't make them and the writing was so far removed that I couldn't understand why she would make them, either.

So I don't know. I think Montimore is a good writer who writes engrossing scenes. I just don't know if the overall novel was a good fit for me.