The Repeat Year by Andrea Lochen

Review by Charlotte Lynn

Olive Watson, an ICU nurse, goes to bed on New Year’s Eve 2012 and wakes up on New Year’s Day 2011.  She finds herself back with her ex-boyfriend, Phil, and her mother not yet married.  To say she is shaken and unsure of what do with this year she can redo is an understatement.  This is a story of Olive’s second chance to relive her past and change things that went wrong.

Olive is an amazing character.  She gets the opportunity to relive a horrible year in her life.  She cheated on her boyfriend of many years causing their relationship to end.  Her mother married a man, Harry, that she really didn’t like, which caused a strain on her relationship with her mother.  She lost contact with her best friend since college.    Instead of going back and just trying to make her life better, she goes back and makes the lives of those around her better. Olive even changes the lives, for the better, of her patients in ICU.  I love how unselfish Olive was in her redo year.   Even with all the unknowns of how the things she would like to change would work out she never gave up hope that things would be better.

The relationship between Phil and Olive is interesting.  Olive feels she is keeping secrets.  Phil feels like Olive doesn’t share enough of her life with him.  I felt like Phil sometimes expected too much of Olive.  When Olive returned home from work unable to share the stress of what happen he took that as a shutout, where I felt like it was really more that she came home to escape not to relive.  I did love that Phil was supportive of Olive’s family and pushed her to be more accepting of them.  He went out of his way to get to know Harry and show that he was not such a bad guy.

The Repeat Year is an adult novel, but a young adult could also enjoy it.  A reader will have to look past what they know to be real, like the inability to go back in time.  But once you get past that you will fall in love with the characters and the story.  This was a book I was unable to put down.  I highly recommend The Repeat Year. 

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