Oona Out of Order

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By Margarita Montimore

Very clever and unique. It requires a lot of suspension of reality, but even I was able to get beyond the challenges. Oona has a peculiar situation in which starting at age 18 each year at the stroke of midnight she leaps “out of order” to another year in her life. She never knows which year will be her next so she must take some time to figure out what is going on, what has happened in the not-yet-experienced years and how to make sense of it all. She leaves herself a letter at the end of each year to be read at the start of the next but she only ever has limited and piecemeal knowledge of her own life. It’s super clever and makes you think about your life, choices and paths taken and not taken and what if anything you’d warn or advise yourself about if you could. Imagine a leap from age 25 to 45 in one night with all that life lived in between and trying to figure out what decisions you made in those unknown years and then from 45 back to 32 knowing where you end up at 45 and trying to make it better or be sure you don’t do anything to screw it up.