Sarah Adlakha's debut, She Wouldn't Change a Thing is blurbed as a "mind-bending story" and for me it certainly was.
Maria Forssmann, thirty-nine, wakes up in her seventeen-year-old body and life. She doesn't know how she got there, and has only sketchy memories of a deceased patient who had recently spoken to her about having a purpose in life.
But nothing matters to her except for one goal: to get back to her adult life where she was a successful psychiatrist, a loving wife, and mother to two daughters and an unborn son.
Adlakha's pacing in this novel is great; I finished this in a matter of a couple days. The writing is strong and the emotional punch in this is huge. I'm not sure what my reading experience for this would be before I had my children, but now as a mother I could feel the heartbreak of Maria's decisions in a very visceral way. There were lots of chills and more than a few tears were shed.
I did have some questions in the end, including if Jenny's POV really needed to be there and the whole gun scene at the storage container stretched my imagination, but on the whole this was a great read and I'm looking forward to more by this author.
Readers may want to be aware of some very serious themes in this book, including suicide and child abuse, which are handled sensitively and not graphically.
Thank you to BookishFirst and Forge Books for providing this ARC for review.
Maria Forssmann, thirty-nine, wakes up in her seventeen-year-old body and life. She doesn't know how she got there, and has only sketchy memories of a deceased patient who had recently spoken to her about having a purpose in life.
But nothing matters to her except for one goal: to get back to her adult life where she was a successful psychiatrist, a loving wife, and mother to two daughters and an unborn son.
Adlakha's pacing in this novel is great; I finished this in a matter of a couple days. The writing is strong and the emotional punch in this is huge. I'm not sure what my reading experience for this would be before I had my children, but now as a mother I could feel the heartbreak of Maria's decisions in a very visceral way. There were lots of chills and more than a few tears were shed.
I did have some questions in the end, including if Jenny's POV really needed to be there and the whole gun scene at the storage container stretched my imagination, but on the whole this was a great read and I'm looking forward to more by this author.
Readers may want to be aware of some very serious themes in this book, including suicide and child abuse, which are handled sensitively and not graphically.
Thank you to BookishFirst and Forge Books for providing this ARC for review.