REVIEW: The Girl I Was by Jeneva Rose

Title: The Girl I Was
Author: Jeneva Rose
Narrator: Hillary Huber
Publisher: Dreamscape Media
Publication Date: November 2021
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Buy the Book: Amazon | BN | Audible

Description: “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.”

Alexis Spencer will use any inspirational quote to rationalize her failures and shortcomings. Her closest friends are a distant memory, and her college debt is still as high as the day she left. But that’s all fine and dandy, because “whatever will be, will be.”

However, when Alexis loses her job and her relationship on the same day, there’s no quote strong enough to get her through that. In typical fashion, she blames the world for her problems, including her younger self, who should have tried harder.

Feeling sorry for herself, Alexis finds a bottle of vodka from her college days and goes on a bender, blacking out in the process. Only this time, she doesn’t wake up at home, or in the right city. In fact, she isn’t even in the right year.

Alexis is back in her college town in the year 2002.

Convinced this is her chance to do things over, she heads to her dorm—and comes face-to-face with her eighteen-year-old unruly self, who goes by Lexi because it’s “sexier.” Getting acclimated to life in the early 2000s is the easy part. Dealing with Lexi is where things prove difficult.

They might be the same person, but they couldn’t be more different from one another. Now Alexis and Lexi must learn to get along and come to terms with the fact that alone, they will never make things right, but together, they could change their life for the better.

My Thoughts: I love it when an author can capture my attention and draw me in across multiple genres. I became familiar with this author when I read The Perfect Marriage which fed my twisty suspense thriller craving so when I came across this book, which is on the opposite side of the universe of thrillers, I was intrigued. Few authors have the ability to change their voice in genre crossovers, but Jeneva Rose is an author who can and I am excited to read everything she writes.

In The Girl I Was, the reader is introduced to Alexis Spencer, a woman who appears to have just drifted through her life without any noteworthy success or milestones met. Her college degree never brought the glorious career she envisioned for herself and though she focuses on a lot of positive affirmations to justify her failures, everything comes to a head when she loses yet another job. Feeling sorry for herself and blaming the entire world, she goes home and takes it out on her boyfriend, which results in the end of her relationship.

She gets cozy with a bottle of vodka and decides all of her failures and disappointments are because her younger self didn’t try hard enough and if she only knew then what she knows now, everything would be different. When Alexis wakes up, she’s back in college in the year 2002. What makes this time travel story interesting is that her younger self is also there and they can occupy the same time and space without creating a paradox that disrupts the time continuum and destroying life as we know it. I also found it interesting that young Lexi and older Alexis don’t like each other and spend a lot of time at odds. The presence of Alexis in Lexi’s life is explained to their friends as Alexis is Lexi’s older sister and yes, it is wild they have the same name. These two characters were so distinctly different that I often forgot they were the same person. Additionally, Alexis has no clue what she is there specifically to fix so she spends a great deal of time just winging it with the results taking me through the many emotions of hilarity, sadness and shock.

This book moves at a wonderful pace and the audio narration performed by Hillary Huber was brilliantly executed. She uses two different voice inflections for Alexis and Lexi which gave me a lot of insight into their personalities.

My Final Verdict: We have all had that question of whether we could go back and tell our younger selves things to spare us from the failures and disappointments in life and we always say we would. After reading this book, I still would, but like Alexis has to learn, the answers we are looking for may not lie in the past, but in the present. I highly recommend this book to readers who love time travel themes, second chances and stories featuring characters with many complex layers.

Thank you to the publisher, Dreamscape Media, who provided an advance reader copy of this book via NetGalley.