Oona Out of Order
by Margarita Montimore
reviewed by Cristyn Hart
Genre: Magical realism
Originally published in 2020
Page Count: 352
Oona Lockhart has a lot to potentially look forward to in 1983. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, she will turn 19. She doesn’t quite know what she wants to do. She could go to London to study economics with her best friend or she could stay at home in Brooklyn to continue to be part of the band she’s in along with her boyfriend, pursuing music. Either choice could lead her life down vastly different routes. She doesn’t expect to know exactly how things will differ depending on the life she chooses until a good way into the future.
However, things don’t go to plan no matter what she wants to do. As the countdown to the new year begins she faints. She then wakes up 32 years in the future in her 51-year-old body. A stranger is there when she wakes up, a young man who claims to be her assistant. He explains to her that starting with her 19th birthday she will find herself in a different year of her life completely out of order. This will be a problem that will restrict what she does going forward. She will have to see how the rest of her life goes.
While this is a book where Oona can bounce around in her time stream many times, Margarita Montimore doesn’t overdo it. In this book you will only have to read through a handful of the years of her life, all at the start of her unintentional time travel journey. She learns important life lessons by living things out of order and develops a lot as a character, though I’m sure there will be some people who dislike how much of a teenager she is at the beginning.
I would also count this as a time travel book. You never find out why she lives life out of order or how the time travel works but that’s okay. This is typical of magical realism. The time travel does a lot to influence some of the characters, especially Oona. I liked how this led to there being two Oona characters in each year described. There is present Oona who is the protagonist and then future Oona who is at times a mentor character and other times a keeper of secrets as she leaves letters explaining things to the next version of Oona next year.
The other characters also develop, but most characters only appear for a year or two in the book. They may also show up later. There are only two characters other than Oona who appear through the majority of the years: her mother and one other. These two do develop; however, as you see their development out of order, it is seen in a different light.
I would recommend this book, more so than Acts of Violet by the same author which I read last year. It was a book I enjoyed reading.
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Personal rating: 4/5