The Backtrack
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Average rating4.5
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 immediately: 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.
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Atypical Tale In So Many Ways Yet Everything Works Well. I'm actually listening to the playlist that plays such heavy role in this book as I sit down to write this review, and while not *everything* is to my own tastes, either back in 2005 or 20 yrs later in 2024 as I write this, the songs are not *so far* out there as to not be enjoyable, particularly given the characters in this story and where they are from. (Says the fellow native Georgian who is less than a decade older than the characters here. :D) As an example, Fall Out Boy and The Offspring? Yes please. :)
But that actually does get into parts of what La Rosa does so well with this tale - the interesting spin she puts on the now-classic "flashback" sequences absolutely work, and work to allow effectively a romance version of a "Frequency" type story. Meaning, for those unfamiliar with that particular movie (to be clear, I never saw the TV show reboot), this storytelling device basically allows La Rosa to tell a dual timeline romance... where *both* timelines are the same couple *yet*... multiverse theory. (Which, to be clear, La Rosa never mentions.)
While we do get some dramatics in the third act, they actually serve more of a women's fiction purpose that also helps to flesh out both our female lead and some of those around her a bit, and even with limited "screentime" in some instances, La Rosa manages to pack quite a bit in here in a short space. Indeed, given the book's overall just-over-300-page length, it is actually rather remarkable just how much story La Rosa manages to pack in here, particularly given how other authors even within the romance space can spend seemingly 100 pages describing the landscape around the characters.
Ultimately this was a fun book that had a lot of nostalgia and several interesting spins on now-classic concepts and it used all of this well in service of the story it was trying to tell. In the end, using the elements you bring in well in service of the story you're trying to tell is really all I ask of *any* book.
Very much recommended.
Originally posted at bookanon.com.
