Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore

Oona Out of Order
by Margarita Montimore
Flatiron Books, 2019

How many of us have looked forward to the coming year and, knowing precisely what’s coming, wish we could skip the year entirely and live a different one, either in our pasts or farther down the line? When making this wish, however, few of us would sign our names on the dotted line, tying ourselves to that future, if we found out that the next year ahead of us would be a completely random one. The titular Oona in Margarita Montimore’s debut novel experiences her own involuntary version of that arrangement in Oona Out of Order, an unexpectedly breezy story of a young woman living her life (if you can believe it) completely out of order.

Beginning when she’s nineteen years old, every year at the stroke of midnight on her birthday - which doubles as New Year’s Day - Oona travels through time, only to land in the body of her older or younger self. She starts each year not knowing where she is in time (and often, in space), yet she must live that year until her next birthday when the whole process will repeat itself. Internally, she’s her real age, while externally, she’s the age the calendar dictates; on her 19th birthday she travels from 1982 to 2015 when her body is a mature 51. Still a teenager at heart, she finds the transition is a bumpy one. If only we all had that excuse to be a petulant teenager when our outward appearance disagrees.

Financial matters aren't a concern, considering money-making ventures like the stock market are kind to those who know the future. But where money isn’t a problem for Oona, nearly everything else is. First is her understandable bewilderment every time she’s dropped into a new year with new faces around her, new technology to learn, and basically a new body to navigate the world in. Hardest of all for Oona is maintaining meaningful relationships when she knows, in all likelihood, the very next year she’ll be yanked away to live in an entirely different decade. Such a life makes her feel like a sailor on shore leave: she has a known, limited quantity of time before she sets sail into the unknown. The end of one year for Oona is quite literally the end of something.

Oona’s “condition” (her euphemism of choice) may give her a leg up when playing the ponies, but it doesn’t let her escape the problems faced by those of us living our lives at a normal rhythm. Even knowing her mistakes ahead of time doesn't necessarily prevent her from making them all over again. Given the power to look into the future, she thinks it will be easy to be the master of her fate and simply pivot her plans to avoid what she knows is coming. Yet for all her maneuvering, she often crashes headlong into the future she had hoped to dodge. Fate, she says, is “an irresistible bastard.”

This story is not only intensely readable, but absolute fodder for daydreaming. If we were all granted the power to foretell our futures, would we attempt to avoid past mistakes or would there be joy in leaning into them all over again? What would we choose for ourselves if we could hand pick elements in our earlier lives that could end up giving us a more vibrant, meaningful future? How much control do any of us have over our lives, really, whether we’re time-hoppers or slaves to the sequential?

Ideal for readers of Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, this book weaves intriguing food for thought into a fun romp of a story. The time travel element may be overly simplified, but the choice allows Montimore to explore other avenues and focus on characters in her debut. Readers will easily slip into Oona’s shoes as she develops following her internal age versus her external one, but learns no less about life for it. In different, yet entirely the same ways as the rest of us, Oona loves and experiences loss, triumphs, and falls flat on her face, but, at the end of the day (or in this case, year) she proves what we all already knew: the passing of time makes fools of us all.

—Olive Fellows is a young professional and Booktuber (at http://youtube.com/c/abookolive) living in Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.