this was fun and little different from the usual ( )

Sweet love story. Not great. ( )

"Diversity" checklist strikes with gay male player of a character on page 7.
Moving on ( )

Frankie and Ezra, inseparable as a couple at Middleton College, broke things off by graduation and haven't talked since. When a couple from their close friend group decides to get married back on campus, ten years later, the pair both make plans to attend. With Y2K looming, the action takes place the morning and day after the rehearsal party. Frankie and Ezra wake up together, with fuzzy to no memory of the events of the previous evening. Together, they attempt to retrace their ill-chosen steps from the night before. It's a good premise but did take me a while to get into the structure of the back-and-forth chapters which mixed the memory of the previous night with their relationship ten years ago. ( )

During the COVID-19 pandemic, bestselling author Allison Winn Scotch was sheltering in her Los Angeles home with her husband and two children. She hadn’t written a word for nine months, and was “listless and depleted,” evaluating ideas for books that failed to resonate with her during “endless quarantine walks.” She recalls she was “just spit balling” because “I felt like I needed to start writing something. She recalls taking one “long walk up my neighborhood hill because I was desperate to get out of the house” during which “a spark of any idea” came to her. A man and woman whose college romance did not work out are reunited when they attend a mutual friend’s wedding. They wake up in bed together with no memory of how they ended up there but have to figure it out quickly because it is New Year’s Eve 1999. She instantly knew that drafting the book would be difficult and says, “indeed, it was very, very hard.” She credits her agent with making her continue writing “when I endlessly complained I couldn’t do it.” It’s a good thing she did, because The Rewind is arguably Scotch’s best work to date.

Frankie Harriman has made a name for herself in the music business, primarily for managing the most successful female band. At thirty-three, she lives in Los Angeles, but travels extensively with the acts she manages, and has not been involved in a serious relationship since she and Ezra Jones broke on the day of their college graduation. When she was just five years old, her parents discovered she was a talented musician with perfect pitch when she played “Bridge Over Troubled Water” after hearing the tune emanating from the record player. Frankie didn’t understand how she did it. She just knew that she saw the notes in front of her the same way she saw colors. And she instinctively knew what key she was playing in. She spent her New York City childhood practicing the piano four hours per day to prepare for competitions, learning to master her nerves and perform with confidence. Her parents fully expected her to enroll in a college with a prestigious music program, but by the age of seventeen she was done. She simply did not want to pursue being a pianist any longer, even though she knew her parents and teachers would be devastated. She wants to at last control her own life and destiny. Her parents only acceded to her wish to attend quaint Middleton University because the Steinway family had recently underwritten the cost of the school’s new auditorium. Frankie kept her musical past from her college friends, instead choosing to pursue a career helping other artists succeed in the music business. But recently she impulsively purchased an upright piano and had it delivered to her apartment. She has not played it . . . yet.

Ezra’s father abandoned his wife and two sons, and his brother, Henry, was much older and left home when Ezra was very young. So growing up, it was just Henry and his mother on their own. Ezra cared for her as she battled ovarian cancer, a fight she lost after graduation. He was a studious, rule-follower destined for law school. But he ended up making a lot of money in the tech industry. Now he has come back to Middleton for their friends’ wedding, intent on proposing to his perfect girlfriend, Mimi, who works for a dating start-up (Datify.com) and loves grand gestures as much as he does, before the stroke of midnight. He even had “12/31/99” engraved in the ring that once belonged to his grandmother.

Frankie and Ezra have checked into their respective hotel rooms and steeled themselves for their inevitable reunion at the rehearsal dinner to which Ezra is headed when the elevator stops. The doors open and there is Frankie in the hotel hallway.

The next thing they know, it is the morning of December 31. Frankie awakens with a splitting headache next to a naked man in a room she doesn’t recognize (which, truthfully, isn’t all that unusual for her which is one of the reasons she quit drinking two months earlier). She screams when she realizes that she is in bed with Ezra and they are in the dorm room in which he resided during their freshman year – before they met. Ezra’s grandmother’s ring is stuck on Frankie’s finger and Ezra is wearing a wedding band on his left right finger.

Why? What happened last night and how did they end up sleeping in a dorm room another student now occupies? Did Mimi ever arrive, as planned? About they only think they agree on is that they have to find out what happened. So they embark on a frequently hilarious quest back to the bar where they both apparently had drinks and various campus locations, gathering clues about the prior evening’s events. Along the way, they argue and fret about the best approach and what steps they should take in search of answers. First, they have to evacuate the dorm room when its very angry current resident returns and finds they slept in her bed. As the day wears on, they trek to the school library, gymnasium, and Steiner Auditorium, discussing their relationship in the process. Their banter is believable, funny, and, as the story proceeds, touching.

Scotch deftly transports readers back to 1999, a time when cell phone functionality was limited to actually making calls and texting. So even if they could find their cell phones, Frankie and Ezra can’t just Google the name of the bar to find out what time it opens. They have to walk there. And Ezra has to deal with the slow dial-up connection to the internet in order to check the airline’s schedule and learn if Mimi’s flight was delayed or canceled. Frankie finds herself negotiating with that dorm resident to get her Walkman back because it contains the rough cut CD of her girl band’s new album. And, of course, there are references to fashion (Frankie wears Doc Martens, of course).

And as Frankie and Ezra gather clues, Scotch reveals their relationship history and what propelled them to break up in such a spectacularly final fashion. She also examines all the ways in which their personalities and quirks differed, how they responded to those differences and supported each other during their relationship, and, most importantly, how they have matured and grown in the years since.

Frankie always reminded Ezra “of a tornado: always in motion, occasionally a thing of beauty too often destructive.” They were “combustible.” Still, they never fought. Ezra suffered from panic attacks that Frankie was able to help him through – although, coincidentally, he has not had one since he and Frankie broke up -- and never had a one-night stand because he believed in monogamy and commitment, and wanted a relationship, not just sex. Ezra unexpectedly finds himself re-evaluating his relationship with Mimi as he is reminded of all the reasons why he loved Frankie so much. He is stunned to find that he has loved “two women so wildly different.” He always avoided confrontation and let Frankie make choices for him. He has been enjoying a “seamless life, one uninterrupted by drama” with Mimi. But is it really enough?

Franke never mourned losing Ezra, their relationship and the possibilities it held, or making music. Rather, she graduated, moved to Los Angeles, and got busy with her career. “It was easier to move on, to force her way through.” Her life has been a whirlwind, but now she realizes that unresolved pain remains until it is confronted. She is shocked by the real reasons he never practiced law because they seem out of character but observes changes in him that remind her their relationship “was the most solid thing that she’d ever held on to her whole life through.”

The Rewind moves along at an unrelenting pace as Frankie and Ezra confront both last night and the things that tore them apart a decade ago. Scotch finds just the right balance of hilarity and poignancy as her two relatable and likable lead characters unexpectedly find themselves on a journey of reflection and self-examination. The histories Scotch has concocted for them seamlessly and credibly inform the two people in their early thirties who need to solve a mystery – and quickly – if so that they can get on with their lives and all that they have planned. Or . . . maybe not? Perhaps after all that they have learned about each other and themselves in the process of finding out what mischief they got into last night, their futures might look very different.

Scotch says she enjoys “capturing that time in your life when you were on the open road and anything was possible. I love exploring that and the dichotomy of getting older.” With The Rewinds, she again proves how adept she is at melding comedy with introspection into a thoroughly entertaining, enjoyable, and, ultimately, heart-tugging and thought-provoking story. She obviously worked through any difficulties or complications she encountered while crafting the story about two people who are presented with an unexpected second chance at love and happiness. The narrative zips along seemingly effortlessly to a thoroughly satisfying and not entirely predictable conclusion.

Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book. ( )