Search - Time of My Life

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book! It makes you stop and think about your own what ifs... The story is about a young mother, who's own mother had abandoned her family when she was just 9 years old. You can see how a lot of her marriage and motherhood issues are stemmed from this. The whole story was put together nicely and tied up with a great ending.

Looking in from the outside, Jill Westfield leads the perfect life. She lives in an affluent New York suburb, is happily married to Henry, a successful lawyer, and is a model mother to her beautiful daughter Katie. But, underneath it all, cracks in their seven year marriage are becoming more and more obvious. Since becoming a partner in his firm, Henry is traveling more and more, rarely coming home to his wife and daughter. Jill, an advertising executive turned housewife, is left to tend the household and raise Katie. She immerses herself in decorating, in cooking, in throwing the best birthday parties, but the loneliness she feels - the loneliness that has been there ever since her own mother abandoned her when she was nine - is hard to escape. Jill moves through her days full of chores and errands on auto-pilot, with Henry seemingly oblivious to the disconnect growing in their marriage.

When Jill hears that her ex Jackson, the one she left after meeting Henry, is getting married, she is sent into a tailspin of what ifs. What if leaving Jackson was not the right decision? What if this was not the life she was meant to live? What if she made the wrong choices all along? Waking up the next morning, Jill finds herself in her oldpre-marriage apartment, the apartment she shared with Jackson. Through some weird time warp, she is thrown back in time to a life pre-Henry, pre-Katie, and most importantly, pre her break-up with Jackson.

Living her past with the knowledge of the future, Jill is making new choices with 20/20 hindsight. She avoids the arguments that led to the demise of her relationship with Jackson, she patches things up with his family, and breathes through campaign pitches at work, already knowing that they will be a success. However, Jill's decisions also affect the lives of those around her, sending them on paths she could not anticipate. Will her second chance allow her to make the choices she believes she should have made the first time around, or is she fated to the life she was already leading?

"Time of My Life" is Allison Winn Scotch's second novel, and an immensely enjoyable and engaging one at that. The abrupt time travel switch from Jill's present life to her past one aside, "Time of My Life" is an interesting look at fate, and of how one single choice can lead to a completely different set of outcomes. I was constantly on the edge of my seat wondering whether Jill would stay with Jackson and let her life take a different direction, or if she would be pulled back to Henry and the motherhood she misses once it's no longer there. "Time of My Life" is both an easy and light read, and one that can spark interesting discussions among its readers.

One of the best books I have ever read - and that is saying a lot considering how much I read. If you have ever been in a long term relationship or are even thinking about it - you should check out this book.

This book is about a woman who is miserable with the day to day drudgery she imposes on herself trying to live up to her own perfectionism. Fortunately, there isn't a lot of whining and moaning about it before she time travels back into her past to take up her life where she was 7 years ago, a few months before she met her husband and ended up where she was. The author just sets the scene and then gets the story rolling. There is no extensive conversation about time travelling either.
On the one hand, I really did enjoy this book because I could relate to a lot of what Jillian was feeling and I loved the little references to all the popular women's magazines that I actually read too. On the other hand, I absolutely hated the ended. I did like that there was some self-revelation that she had to be in control of allowing herself to express her own wants and needs. However, it just seemed like the whole ending was that everything that went wrong had been her fault and she just wasn't remembering right.
Plus, the ending left a lot of clues to what had changed in her life but didn't go into explanations. It just sort of stopped. I actually thought maybe at the end we would find out that her husband had also travelled back to the past to try to set things right in their marriage based on some of the things that he did differently when she was in the past and I think that would have made a nice twist.
Other than that, it was an enjoyable read with not a ton of predictability.

What a fun book!

I loved the concept of the book. The choices we make. Where they lead us. And what if?