Book Review: The Girl I Was by Jeneva Rose

Book #32 of 2022:

The Girl I Was by Jeneva Rose

I dig the premise of this novel, featuring a 35-year-old from 2019 somehow transported back in time to meet herself as a college freshman in 2002, but I’ve found both versions of the character to be insufferably vapid and cruel, and I don’t buy their sudden respective personal growth at the end of the story. Older Alexis is frustratingly oblivious throughout too, as when she doesn’t realize a request to see her temp job’s HR at closing time on Friday is more likely to be for a dismissal than a promotion, or when she misses all the cues that her brother in the past has been hitting on her — unaware they’re related — until he literally moves in for a kiss.

The one area where the title transcends itself is in a trip home for Thanksgiving (with the heroine introduced as a classmate of her teenage self, leading to that awkward sibling moment), which is surprisingly poignant thanks to her knowledge, kept from young Lexi, that their mother will die the following year from an undiagnosed heart condition. Of course, that’s weakened when the protagonist later discovers that she can change her own timeline after all and doesn’t immediately run to the phone and tell her mom to see a doctor!

Still, if the family visit and parent/child relationship had made up the majority of this text — as in Helen Fisher’s excellent Faye, Faraway / Space Hopper — I would probably feel more warmly towards the project. Instead there are far too many scenes with the lower stakes of homework and school friends and trying to convince a stubborn kid to stop partying so much, and not enough justification for why such a shallow person would have been moved by the experience at either age.

[Content warning for fatphobia, alcohol abuse, disordered eating, car accident, and slut-shaming.]

★★☆☆☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog