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    If I Could Turn Back Time: A Novel
    If I Could Turn Back Time: A Novel
    If I Could Turn Back Time: A Novel
    Audiobook7 hours

    If I Could Turn Back Time: A Novel

    Written by Elizabeth Harbison

    Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Told with Beth Harbison's wit and warmth, If I Could Turn Back Time is the fantasy of every woman who has ever thought, "If I could go back in time, knowing what I know now, I'd do things so differently..."

    Thirty-seven year old Ramie Phillips has led a very successful life. She made her fortune and now she hob nobs with the very rich and occasionally the semi-famous, and she enjoys luxuries she only dreamed of as a middle-class kid growing up in Potomac, Maryland. But despite it all, she can't ignore the fact that she isn't necessarily happy. In fact, lately Ramie has begun to feel more than a little empty.

    On a boat with friends off the Florida coast, she tries to fight her feelings of discontent with steel will and hard liquor. No one even notices as she gets up and goes to the diving board and dives off...

    Suddenly Ramie is waking up, straining to understand a voice calling in the distance...It's her mother: "Wake up! You're going to be late for school again. I'm not writing a note this time..."

    Ramie finds herself back on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, with a second chance to see the people she's lost and change the choices she regrets. How did she get back here? Has she gone off the deep end? Is she really back in time? Above all, she'll have to answer the question that no one else can: What it is that she really wants from the past, and for her future?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateJul 28, 2015
    ISBN9781427261038
    If I Could Turn Back Time: A Novel
    Author

    Elizabeth Harbison

    New York Times bestselling author Beth Harbison started cooking when she was eight years old, thanks to Betty Crocker’s Cook Book for Boys and Girls. After graduating college, she worked full-time as a private chef in the DC area, and within three years she sold her first cookbook, The Bread Machine Baker. She published four cookbooks before moving on to writing women’s fiction, including the runaway bestseller Shoe Addicts Anonymous and When in Doubt, Add Butter. She lives in Palms Springs, California. 

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    Reviews for If I Could Turn Back Time

    3/5

    32 ratings8 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Don’t we all think from time to time about going back in time? Wondering what would have happened if we had made different decisions. It’s a plot device that has been used time and time again in books – sometimes to wonderful effect and sometimes not so well. In this novel, I’m sorry to write, it falls further to the not so well side. Ramie Phillips is 37 and seemingly has it all; a great job, lots of money and a great group of friends. She is out celebrating her 38th birthday and instead of feeling happy she is feeling unsettled. After receiving news from her friends that causes her to further consider her life she drinks a little too much and does something very foolish. When she wakes up it’s not where she expects….Imagine waking up on the eve of your 18th birthday with full knowledge of the life you have led for the 20 years into your future. What would change? Would you want to change anything? This is suddenly what Ramie is facing as she finds herself awakening in her childhood bed with her 37 year old’s knowledge in her 18 year old life. It takes her a while to sort out what is going on but she realizes that perhaps she can change some things she regrets from her past – most of all maybe she can do something to stop her father from dying so young. But what is the cost of changing history? There is danger in doing so.The concept of the book is a strong one and it’s one that has worked exceedingly well over and over in other stories. In this one it just doesn’t come together as well as it could. Young Ramie is obsessed with sex and very repetitive. It’s as if she needs to keep explaining the same thing to herself over and over again to have the information sink in. While she claims to be a hard charging 37 year old in this 18 year old body she really reads and acts like a child no matter how old she is. She does eventually learn but it’s a quick lesson to wrap up the book. I was left really wanting more.
    • 5/5
      This was in the fun listening category--audio read by Orlagh Cassidy. The overlapping domino effect of everything in life challenges the idea that you could go back in time and change even the smallest detail. I thought Harrison managed to make at least ME feel that the main character, Ramie, really was experiencing a time traveling experience of some sort. The author cleverly, if expectedly, pulled the sequence of things together nicely.
    • 2/5
      This book was given to me by the Goodreads First Reads program.

      First, the narration of this book was excellent. The reader did a good job giving life to the text, even when the text itself fell flat.

      The book started out strong. Right away I felt I knew and cared about the main character. I was thrilled to listen to a book about a strong woman who was closer to 40 than to 30, who had built her own life and enjoyed it to the full. I enjoyed the ending. Even the contrived bits felt right, satisfying.

      My pleasure melted away in the rest of the book. I might have forgiven it for rambling, for spelling out every single, drawn-out thought that crossed Ramie's mind, if it weren't for the 2 glaring contradictions.


      Telling you what they are make for huge spoilers, so stop here if you want to come to this book fresh.












      First we find out that Ramie drank so much the previous weekend that she had no idea that she'd started making out with some guy she hardly knew. Her friend had to tell her about it. That HAD to happen to make the end of the book work, as she will run into that guy later. However, totally unironically, she insists that her mom should trust her because she never drinks too much and is always careful about alcohol. This wasn't said to her mother, Ramie actually believes this to be the case when she says it, as if it is absolutely true - which it clearly isn't, given the previous weekend. The insistence on her responsibility about booze didn't have to be in the book at all - which would have prevented this contradiction that totally threw me out of the story.

      But even that I could have forgiven - if it weren't for the second contradiction.

      Early on Ramie tells us that her father died at work. When his secretary found him slumped over in his office, it was already too late to save him. Ramie went on to work through her guilt that he died alone; it was clearly an important part of her past.

      Later in the book she explains, in poignant detail, how her father died at home, while her mother was out of town and she was out with a friend. She explains how she found him, what she did, and how she felt about it all. I really wish I could have sunk into that. Instead I was shouting at the CD player.


      I'm willing to give this author another shot. She's clearly able to write good stuff. I wish she had used those skills through the whole novel.
    • 4/5
      If I Could Turn Back Time by Beth Harbison is an "if I knew then what I know now" kind of time travel book.The writing is good but there were times when I felt Harbison had already made her point yet insisted on saying the same thing in a slightly different manner. That was probably the biggest let down in the book. Each nuanced retelling of a thought was well-written but even the superior writing couldn't overcome the deja vu effect. That said, the story was still quite good.I think Harbison's greatest strength, in other books as well, is her characterizations. She makes her characters easy to appreciate on their own terms and, mostly, likeable. Even better than being likeable I think is that she makes them understandable. Whether I might like or dislike a character, if I can understand her then I can empathize.Aside from the repetition of some thoughts the other stumbling block for me was what I will call the fun element. I want a character who travels back to a time we have all likely imagined going back to to have fun with it. A little less overthinking and a bit more "what the hell, go for it." I just didn't feel the fun from Ramie so I didn't have the level of fun I wanted to experience vicariously through her.While I don't think this is Harbison's best work I would still recommend this to readers who like to ponder the idea of going into our past and re-living some moments. I do think this will appeal more to those who like the lessons learned from such stories more than the pure fun of them. But there is enough of both to satisfy.Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads' First Reads.
    • 1/5
      Blah. Picked this one up because the premise was interesting and wanted to see the author's spin on it. Who doesn't want to go back and see what would have happened if things turned out differently?

      So we get a lot of chapter time on when she goes back to being 18. Then we get pulled into going back at 25? after she changed things at 18, with realizing that she made all the wrong changes...and a short abrupt shift back to present day with the result that she was really in a short coma the entire time.

      Typical, nothing new, nothing special. It would have been far more interesting to find out that the father had warped back (when she was in the 18 time period and was talking to him and trying to get him to change his ways) and was stuck in the same situation.

      The ending was very abrupt and all of suddenly very "but everything will be okay now".
    • 4/5
      With a twist on the idea of time travel, Ramie has the chance to see what life would be like if she had made different choices in her life... But it is also a chance to get some last, needed advice from a beloved father who passed away too soon.
    • 4/5
      I am always excited when Beth Harbison has a new book released, she always weaves fun stories. Fun stories, but ones that sometimes make you think of your own life and imagine "what if" for a good part of the book. This would be one of those. What would you change in your past if you could? Were things as you remember? And if you had the chance to change something, would it alter everything or would things still come out the same In the end? We all have regrets, I know there's things in my past that if I had the experience and wisdom that I do now, would I want to have a different outcome? Dangerous thinking because one change could make my life entirely different, I may not be married to who I am married to, my kids wouldn't be my kids. That's not to say that I wouldn't pay more attention to things or special people around me or want rearrange a few things but maybe the mistakes we make, we are supposed to make, to get us where we should be. After a huge smack on the head Ramie finds herself waking up in her bedroom at the age of 18. How do you act 18 when you are 38 and are an investment banker with all the wisdom of 38 years? Your parents are close to your own age, your friends are 20 years your junior and you know so much about how the world is now that they couldn't even imagine. Although as Ramie said , those teenage make out times were pretty fantastic, there is just something magical about them, experiencing that again might be worth the trip. And what I wouldn't give to have my 18 year old body again. But what happens if Ramie never goes back? What happens to all of the people she knows now? Does she have to relive the last 20 years over again and everything changes? Would she make totally different choices and her whole world is altered?This would make a fantastic movie, some parts were hysterically funny and I could just imagine them on the big screen. But while some of this book was so funny and nostalgic, there is a message too. Going back to a time in our teens might just give us wisdom and understanding and closure. This is a pretty quick read but to me it is not a forgettable one but one that will stay with me. I thoroughly enjoyed Ramie's trip to the past.
    • 3/5
      Don’t we all think from time to time about going back in time? Wondering what would have happened if we had made different decisions. It’s a plot device that has been used time and time again in books – sometimes to wonderful effect and sometimes not so well. In this novel, I’m sorry to write, it falls further to the not so well side. Ramie Phillips is 37 and seemingly has it all; a great job, lots of money and a great group of friends. She is out celebrating her 38th birthday and instead of feeling happy she is feeling unsettled. After receiving news from her friends that causes her to further consider her life she drinks a little too much and does something very foolish. When she wakes up it’s not where she expects….Imagine waking up on the eve of your 18th birthday with full knowledge of the life you have led for the 20 years into your future. What would change? Would you want to change anything? This is suddenly what Ramie is facing as she finds herself awakening in her childhood bed with her 37 year old’s knowledge in her 18 year old life. It takes her a while to sort out what is going on but she realizes that perhaps she can change some things she regrets from her past – most of all maybe she can do something to stop her father from dying so young. But what is the cost of changing history? There is danger in doing so.The concept of the book is a strong one and it’s one that has worked exceedingly well over and over in other stories. In this one it just doesn’t come together as well as it could. Young Ramie is obsessed with sex and very repetitive. It’s as if she needs to keep explaining the same thing to herself over and over again to have the information sink in. While she claims to be a hard charging 37 year old in this 18 year old body she really reads and acts like a child no matter how old she is. She does eventually learn but it’s a quick lesson to wrap up the book. I was left really wanting more.