Dr. Maria Forssmann is a busy woman. She is a psychiatrist and her husband Will is a surgeon. They have 2 young girls and Maria is very pregnant with their son. She is struggling to get everything done herself, to take care of the girls’ school projects, to buy the groceries, to take care of her patients. She is very happy with her life, but she does sometimes forget that while dealing with all the details of a busy life.
And then she gets a visit from a new patient. Sylvia comes in with a story that is quite literally unbelievable. Sylvia tells Maria that she is there from the future. She’s not an intentional time traveler, just someone who got caught in a loop somehow. And while Maria’s training is telling her that Sylvia is schizophrenic, her patient says something that stops Maria in her tracks. She tells the doctor that her assistant is going to shoot her that weekend.
Maria is unsettled and confused, knowing that her assistant would never shoot her on purpose, but Sylvia told her not to go to the storage unit she has. The shooting happens at the storage unit, and Maria doses not survive. Maria is stopped for a second, barely remembering that she even had a storage unit and bringing up a forgotten memory of letting her assistant use it for a while. But how could Sylvia know any of that? It doesn’t seem possible. Unless Sylvia is telling the truth about somehow coming back form the future.
But Maria still has trouble believing her, so she goes to the storage unit that weekend to check on it. At some point, she loses consciousness. She remembers bright lights in her face and the sound of her husband’s voice. And then she falls back asleep. When she wakes up, she’s at home.
Only it’s not the home of the 39-year-old mother, wife, and psychiatrist. It’s the home she grew up in, and the mirror shows her that she is 17 again. All she can think to ask about is her son, the boy who was ready to come into the world just as she lost 22 years of her life. She steals her parent’s car and heads for the house she lives in, in her future life. But there’s nothing there. The neighborhood she lives in with Will and her daughters doesn’t even exist yet.
But then she meets Henry. She feels like maybe she knows him somehow, but more importantly, he understands what she’s saying about coming back from the future. Because he did too. As Maria figures out more about where she is in time and why, she realizes that she has a purpose in this timeline. And there may be a way for her to get back to her life. But she can’t go back if she fulfills her purpose. And if she doesn’t fulfill her purpose and makes it back to her original life, will she be able to live with herself knowing about the suffering she caused by ignoring what she was supposed to do?
She Wouldn’t Change a Thing is a mind0bending travel through the life (lives?) of characters who go from one life to another with the memories of their last go-around. Author Sarah Adlakha has created a complicated plot that weaves around itself and takes you to completely unexpected places.
This is not an easy book to read. It demands a lot of the reader, both as far as understanding the tricky movement of the plot and for dealing with the powerful emotional journey that these characters undertake. It is worth it to get to the end, because that is very fulfilling, but the journey there is draining and a little confusing. The marketing copy compares She Wouldn’t Change a Thing with the movie Sliding Doors. I love that movie, and while there is some overlap in the way you see the different life choices and how they effect the characters, but this book makes you take a far more difficult trek to the happy ending. It’s a worthwhile adventure, but a dangerous one. Pack lots of snacks and drinks for the trip, and have fun!
Egalleys for She Wouldn’t Change a Thing were provided by Macmillan’s Forge Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.
