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trin 's review for:
Fifty in Reverse
by Bill Flanagan
In 2020, Peter Wyatt is 65 years old, happily married, with three grown children. Then he wakes up back in his 15-year-old body in 1970. Is he mad, in a coma, or back in time?
I raced through this book. Flanagan has an engaging style, and an ear for entertaining (if not always realistic) dialogue. Much of the opening is framed in conversations between Peter and his new therapist, Terry Canyon, who I expected to dislike -- he rides a motorcycle and studied under Timothy Leary! -- but who Flanagan succeeds in making oddly endearing. These early chapters, where Peter and Terry are trying to figure out the logic behind Peter's situation -- Peter practically and Terry, not believing but trying to help Peter -- are the best in the book. Through them, Flanagan lofts into the air a series of moral quandaries: should Peter fight to preserve the future he knows, in which he was personally happy, or try to change the world for the better? Can he and should he try to prevent major disasters? (He's blindsided early on by Kent State.) Should he proceed like a 65-year-old trapped in a 15-year-old's body, or like a 15-year-old who's had a glimpse 50 years into the future?
Unfortunately, having raised these fascinating, complicated questions, Flanagan kind of just leaves them hanging there. While never losing its fast pace or even parts of its poignancy, the book then turns down a, to me, far less interesting road, in which Peter -- who in the future married a musician and worked for a company like Spotify -- decides to finally take his stab at musical glory . . . by stealing songs written by famous artists of the decades to come. Even this diversion into the plot of the movie Yesterday doesn't really come to anything, or have any consequences, as Peter soon discovers that the 1970 he's come back to is. To me, this revelation robbed the book of much of its urgency and moral weight. I was still touched by some of the bridge building that occurs between Peter and his parents (and between Peter and his poor lonely guidance counselor -- ), but for a book about lost chances, I feel like this novel misses out on a lot more complex but more interesting books it could have been. I still enjoyed it, but as a diversion, nothing more.
I raced through this book. Flanagan has an engaging style, and an ear for entertaining (if not always realistic) dialogue. Much of the opening is framed in conversations between Peter and his new therapist, Terry Canyon, who I expected to dislike -- he rides a motorcycle and studied under Timothy Leary! -- but who Flanagan succeeds in making oddly endearing. These early chapters, where Peter and Terry are trying to figure out the logic behind Peter's situation -- Peter practically and Terry, not believing but trying to help Peter -- are the best in the book. Through them, Flanagan lofts into the air a series of moral quandaries: should Peter fight to preserve the future he knows, in which he was personally happy, or try to change the world for the better? Can he and should he try to prevent major disasters? (He's blindsided early on by Kent State.) Should he proceed like a 65-year-old trapped in a 15-year-old's body, or like a 15-year-old who's had a glimpse 50 years into the future?
Unfortunately, having raised these fascinating, complicated questions, Flanagan kind of just leaves them hanging there. While never losing its fast pace or even parts of its poignancy, the book then turns down a, to me, far less interesting road, in which Peter -- who in the future married a musician and worked for a company like Spotify -- decides to finally take his stab at musical glory . . . by stealing songs written by famous artists of the decades to come. Even this diversion into the plot of the movie Yesterday doesn't really come to anything, or have any consequences, as Peter soon discovers that the 1970 he's come back to is