You Cannot Mess This Up by Amy Weinland Daughters ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

A True Story That Never Happened

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

June 2019; She Writes Press; 978-1631525834
audio, ebook, print (252 pages); women's fiction

The year is 2014 and Amy is 46 years old and lives with her husband and sons in Dayton Ohio.  Her parents ask her to come to Houston to spend Thanksgiving weekend so that they can discuss their plans for their estate with her and her brother and sister.  Somehow when she gets off of the private plane in Houston, she's in the year 1978.  She is instructed to spend the next 36 hours with her family in 1978 and pose as a long-lost cousin who just happened to be in town and needed a place to spend the holiday.  One of the people she spends time with is herself as a 10-year-old.  I found it very interesting as she relived her memories -- spending time with her parents and looking at them differently as an adult than her 10-year-old self did.  There were a lot of references to clothes and music,  TV cartoons, eating sweet cereal, and having dinner at the Bonanza buffet.  One of the biggest things that she had forgotten was that everyone was smoking cigarettes and she was amazed to remember that there were no seat belts in cars.  As she spends time with her family, she realizes that the difficult relationships that she had with her family were due to her faulted memory as she grew up and that the family was really more of a nuclear unit than she remembered.  She was told that her trip to the past would not change her future but she realizes when she gets back to her real time period that she will never forget her new memories of her past.

The only thing that I didn't like about the book is that there was never a real reason given for Amy to go back into the past.  She did learn more about her past but it seems like there should have been some very important reason for the time change.  This left me a bit confused about the story.

I'll admit that books about time travel are not my favorite genre but this book may have changed that.  It made me spend time thinking about how  I would react to being in a similar situation and watching myself at certain ages when I was growing up, spending time with long gone parents and grandparents and having fun with my brothers and sisters back when every day was a new adventure.  Reading this book brought back a lot of memories - bad as well as good - and that made me appreciate the book even more.

Buy You Cannot Mess This Up at Amazon

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is two hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.   

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