The Memo by Rachel Dodes, Lauren Mechling
Rating: 3.5/5
Spice: 0
Primary Genre: Women’s Fiction
Trigger Warnings: Emotional abuse, toxic relationship, toxic friendship, abandonment, drug use
Favorite Quote: No matter how hard I pounded the dough, I was never quite able to knead away the sense that I was committed to a guy who would never be fully committed to me.
Plot 4.5/5:
A time travel, second chance/do-over fiction. Jenny Green has squandered her potential. She has made a mess of her career, her boyfriend Hal broke off their engagement and seems more interested in the girl down the hall than her, and to top it all off she’s promised her friends that she’d attend their college reunion this year and she feels like she has accomplished nothing since graduation. Her friends are incredibly successful and so are many of her classmates. Jenny can’t help but wonder if she missed the memo. How did her life get so off track? She starts receiving strange text messages about her memo once she arrives on campus for her reunion and comes to realized that she actually did miss her memo. And she’s being given another chance at the life she’d have if she hadn’t.
The Good:
* I found this book to be very smart and witty. While I didn’t necessarily feel like I “liked” the characters, I was certainly entertained by them.
* I really liked the time travel element of being able to go back in time and change certain past events to improve the future. It was interesting to see the side effects of what Jenny does in the past and how it effects her present.
* I loved the female support and friendship themes throughout the book
* There’s some pretty amazing character development for Jenny in this book. She comes a long way in her relationship with her mother, as well as becoming willing to let go of her toxic relationship
The Meh:
* I wish that the timehops were more in depth, they seemed to be abbreviated at times and I felt like they could have been explored more deeply
* I don’t really understand Jenny reconciling with Leigh’s character. The past and present interactions with Leigh seem mostly negative. If she were my college friend, I’d probably just let that friendship go. Especially with the whole doing drugs/selling drugs thing.
* I would have liked to see some gold old-fashioned vengeance regarding how the Consortium seems to have grossly mishandled several lives.
Bottom Line:
I thoroughly enjoyed this read. It’s always an interesting concept to consider. If you could go back and change things, would you? I think that this was really well done. Self-deprecating yet funny. Not incredibly sad or depressing with a focus on the power of friendship. I would definitely recommend, especially to someone who likes time travel books.
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