Can you fall in love for the first time twice? A recently widowed women is about to find out when she wakes up and finds herself eighteen again in this “highly entertaining” story of second chances (Guardian) by the star of Peep Show Kate’s husband Luke — the man she loved from the moment she met him twenty-eight years ago — died suddenly. Since then she has pushed away her friend and lost her … she has pushed away her friend and lost her job, and everything is starting to fall apart.
One day, she wakes up in the wrong room and in the wrong body. She is eighteen again but remembers everything. This is her college room in 1992 on the first day of orientation. And this is the day she meets Luke.
Kate knows how he died, and that he’s already ill. But Luke is not the man that she lost: he’s still a boy — the annoying nineteen-year-old English student she first met. If they can fall in love again despite everything, she might just be able to save him. She’s going to try to do everything exactly the same . . .
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Well, that’s 7 plus hours I can’t get back. Yep, that’s exactly what I thought when I listened to the last page of this one, and it’s still what I think after giving it a few days to mull it over. I tend to jot down thoughts about a book as I read or listen, and looking back over those notes, I see that my opinion hasn’t improved since I scribbled those thoughts down. The most standout of those are the words info dump in bold and underlined letters. Lots and lots of info dumps. Now, I don’t like that style in any book, even those I’m reading, but they take on a whole new level of irritating in an audiobook. I mean, sooner or later, I’m going to start zoning out, and then I have to rewind to see if I missed something important. Even more irritating is when the info dump is about a character who is neither important or even seen again.
The thing about this book is that I had it loaded up and was ready to listen when I lost my own husband quite suddenly. Needless to say, I knew this one would have to wait. I really wasn’t sure that I’d be able to get through it at all, and the first part was as difficult for me as I expected. The second part wasn’t as difficult, partly because those earlier mentioned info dumps were starting to wear on me. But the third part was just… Well, bad is the only word that comes to mind. That third part kind of felt like a rough draft with ideas being bounced around, and it just didn’t work for me.
Since I am discussing the audiobook, I will add that the narrator, Olivia Colman, does a good job giving Kate a voice. So, I would listen to her again, just not on a Robert Webb book. Basically, when you look at all three parts together, the continuity is sorely lacking, so I think I’ll just chalk this one up to not the one for me, not by a longshot.
I was so disappointed not to have liked this because I loved Robert Webb’s autobiography How Not To Be A Boy and the blurb of this sounded so intriguing. Come Again centres around Kate Mardsen, who has just lost Luke, her partner of 28 years, to an undetected brain tumour and is wracked with guilt over not spotting his health issues sooner. She’s on the verge of taking her own life when she is suddenly (and inexplicably) transported back in time to the day they met, Freshers Week 1992 at the University of York. She knows that the brain tumour is already growing in Luke’s head so the question is whether Kate can manage to relive falling in love with her dead husband for the first time and save him from death in the future. Honestly, if this had just been a sentimental rumination on nostalgia, lost innocence and the nature of fate, like I was expecting, I think it would have been a perfectly fine first novel. It was funny and bits of it were genuinely quite heartfelt and moving. I would have even been able to look the other way about the rather heavy handed and preachy monologues about the state of modern politics (which I didn’t even disagree with, they just felt a bit clumsy and shoehorned in). But I cannot forgive the total and utter bollocks that was the whole spy caper that ended up taking up a good half of the book. The blurb promised a bittersweet rumination on loss and first love, not karate chopping Russian mobsters and evading them with the help of taxi drivers who secretly work for MI6 (I wish I was making this up). It almost felt like Webb was afraid to write something too overly sappy and so felt the need to stick a bonkers car chase in. And if that wasn’t enough, I could have really done without the little plot twist in the epilogue. In the interest of not spoiling anything, all I’ll say is that if you’re going to drop a bomb like that you need a narratively consistent explanation for it.