Book Notices | Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

Amazon   Jen Brotherhood sees her teenage son kill someone and is immediately plunged into a nightmare. There's the expected one—police lights and handcuffs and shock. She has no idea what could possibly have led to this. But she wakes up the next morning in a second nightmare: She's started to live her life backwards, by days, weeks, years. Every morning brings a new date in the past. Obviously, that's a fascinating prospect in some ways: the phones get bigger; her son gets shorter; she gets to see old living spaces and old coworkers, old waistlines; old people grow younger, and the dead return to life. Cool idea. But meanwhile, she's trying to figure out what led to her son becoming a killer so she can prevent it from happening again. It's an interesting concept, and the book was a fun read. I found it a bit difficult to keep track of the timeline, although the author does do a good job in the narrative of locating us in the "present" with each time jump. One thing I really hated is an ostensibly small thing, but it had a big impact on my enjoyment of the book. The titles of most of the chapters refer to the date Jen has jumped to relative to day zero, for example, "Day Minus One Thousand Six Hundred Seventy-Two, 21:25." As you can see, the numbers get pretty big. And as you can see, they are written in words. I found it surprisingly difficult to mentally process them this way. Imagine how annoying and, to a degree, difficult it would be to read the time on a clock as, say, "eleven forty-seven" rather than 11:47. That's the trouble I had with it. This probably contributed to my having to refer back to the previous chapter's title each time to see how much time had passed in the jump. The information in written form simply hadn't stuck. (And then there was the added difficulty of having to convert something like "one thousand six hundred seventy-two days" into the more meaningful units of years and months.) I would suggest that these title dates be changed to digits if it all possible in subsequent editions of the book.