I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Published by Canary Street Press on July 16, 2024
Genres: Adult Contemporary Romance
Pages: 304
Source: the publisher
Format: E-galley
My Rating:

Goodreads
Buy on Amazon, Buy on Barnes & Noble, Buy on Audible
Blurb:
Life, rewound …
Nearly twenty years ago, Sam Leto left her small hometown of Tybee Island, Georgia, to pursue her dreams of becoming a pilot. While she’d prefer to keep flying away from her painful childhood memories, her beloved grandmother Pearl decides it’s time to sell the family home. Reluctantly, Sam is summoned back to pack up the house.
The 2000s nostalgia from Sam’s old bedroom hits Fall Out Boy posters, drawers of roll-on body glitter and even her favorite CD player with a mixtape from her best friend, Damon Rocha. Damon was always a safe place and Sam often wonders what if her teenage self admitted her feelings for him back then…
Mysteriously, the CD player still works all these years later. And somehow it has the power to show Sam an alternate version of her life.
Song by song, Sam receives flashbacks from her past—senior prom, graduation, leaving home. But the memories aren’t as she remembers them; they show what could have been. Suddenly, Sam knows exactly what would have happened if she’d taken a chance with Damon—and she can’t help feeling she made a terrible mistake leaving Tybee all those years ago.
My Review
My 2nd second chance romance read in a row! But once again I loved it! It was almost perfect! I loved the way the CD player was giving Sam flashbacks, but not flashbacks exactly because they are actually new memories of what might have been if she’d only given in and kissed Damon on that one night back in high school. As someone who thinks back a lot of times to certain moments where I wish maybe I’d made a different decision, it is nice to get this look at what or how things might have been better in some ways, but also there are things in Sam’s life (or my own life) that would not be the same, things that could change how the happiness level could be.
Of course as you’d expect, at first the changes seem to be wonderful. Even if they turn what Sam calls “Alt-Sam” into a bit of a different version of herself. She says and does things that our heroine can’t imagine actually doing. Which obviously are partly probably from the changed decisions, as well as just the fact that this Alt-Sam thinks or chooses differently. Of course things don’t keep going smoothly. And of course Sam can’t really tell anyone about these “visions” she’s having. Or when she does, her friend thinks she’s hallucinating and needs an intervention.
Then things get a little crazy back at home where Sam has gone to help her grandmother get ready to maybe move to a senior community. First, right before the hurricane comes in and hits, Sam’s mother shows up out of the blue. And now Sam has to face the issues she has with her mom leaving her. But as you can expect, there is more to that than the story that Sam has always believed and been told by her grandmother. She finds herself falling again for Damon outside of the visions too. I mean he really is such the perfect guy for her, other than he lives there, and she lives in Paris with her whole pilot career. Not to mention the huge change in her life in the visions, that take away some of her most important parts of her current life and she has to decide maybe she didn’t choose wrong after all, but can she make any new decisions that might work out now?
A fun story, definitely recommend!
Sounds like a unique and fun premise! It would be something to go back and change things you wished you did differently!
Or it might not be better, the motto of the story! lol
That is an interesting concept of getting to see how making a different choice would have altered her life. Fun idea to pair it with the music in the CD player.
The mix CD aspect was fun!