In The Rewind by Allison Winn Scott, They say some things are better left in the past. And that’s 
exactly how Frankie Harriman and Ezra Jones have thought about their break up on their college graduation day ten years ago. In the years since, they both have moved on in their lives, through the good and bad. These days, Frankie’s career as a record label manager has her traversing the world and in hot demand with numerous music acts. After some bumps in the road, Ezra’s luck changed for the better as well, leaving him with the hope that he will soon get to marry his girlfriend Mimi, shortly after the new millennium ushers itself in.
‘She wasn’t here for nostalgia; she wasn’t interested in a trip down memory lane. Getting swept up in emotion today wasn’t going to help anything.’
It’s when Frankie and Ezra are each invited back to their old campus for their mutual college friends’ wedding that they have to finally face down the truth of what led to them splitting up in 1989. But shortly after they meet again for the first time in a decade, everything goes sideways. A campus-wide scavenger hunt turns into a drunken night with harsh words, good memories, getting maced, general tomfoolery, and a possible concussion. Oh, and somehow Ezra and Frankie wake up in bed together the next morning with no idea–and no memories–of what happened the previous night, leaving them to unravel the events as well as what this means for them in their current lives.
‘How did he arrive back at Middleton so full of optimism and just twenty-four hours later, have everything unravel into a mess that he couldn’t even imagine he could mend?’
A comedy of errors, a ten year old grudge, and a couple waking up together with way too many unanswered questions about the night before, The Rewind was eye-openingly insightful with its honest emotions and well-timed humor.
‘What Ezra Jones always needed was a plan. What Frankie Harriman always needed was a foil. They never could have worked. They were always a thunderstorm of impending doom.’
The Rewind had an interesting premise that played out well by the heartfelt ending. It was the first quarter or so of the novel that I struggled with a bit, trying to keep track of which era the paragraph was being told from where we jumped from 1999 back to the late 1980s within the same scene. Plus Ezra and Frankie spent the majority of the book saying they hated each other, which made me wonder how they would be able to reconcile. Once I got my bearings and more of Frankie and Ezra’s past was revealed, I fell into the flow of the story. That’s when I felt like I just had to know what initially broke the couple up in 1989 at their college graduation and of course what happened for them to end up in bed together with no knowledge or recollection of the night before on New Year’s Eve 1999.
It was quite a timeline to piece together. So for that alone, I have to give major kudos to Allison Winn Scott. And as a child of the 1980s myself, all of the nostalgia warmed my heart and made me smile, particularly the music that was such a big part of Frankie’s life. I don’t want to give too many details of her situation away, but Frankie was probably the character I had to warm up to the most. She was prickly, opinionated, and had no verbal filter, not thinking how it might hurt others. But underneath that tough persona, she was a woman who always had to fight for her independence. So the fact that she *could* speak her own mind, make her own choices was something to cheer on for the most part.
Ezra ended up being a little more complicated than I initially thought. Delightfully so, actually. He was more of a beta hero who seemed to be a pushover when it came to the people he loved, mostly from the losses he suffered early in life. But when Ezra and Frankie met up for the first time in ten years at their college friends’ wedding festivities, he showed more of a backbone and was more decisive than in the past. It felt like, at age thirty-two, Ezra finally took control of his life, admitting what he wanted and needed instead of going with the flow. And I loved that transition for him.
QOTD: The Rewind had so much fun nostalgia from the 1980s & 1990s. (Y2K, anyone?) Looking back on those two decades, do you have any favorite music, books, movies, TV shows, or celebs?
Book Info:
Publication: Published November 1st 2022 | Berkley |
After a decade apart, two exes have to decide if they will overcome their complicated past in the span of 24 hours in this whip-smart rom-com from New York Times bestselling author Allison Winn Scotch.
When college sweethearts Frankie and Ezra broke up before graduation, they vowed to never speak to each other again. Ten years later, on the eve of the new millennium, they find themselves back on their snowy, picturesque New England campus together for the first time for the wedding of mutual friends. Frankie’s on the rise as a music manager for the hottest bands of the late ’90s, and Ezra’s ready to propose to his girlfriend after the wedding. Everything is going to plan—they just have to avoid the chasm of emotions brought up when they inevitably come face to face.
But when they wake up in bed next to each other the following morning with Ezra’s grandmother’s diamond on Frankie’s finger, they have zero memory of how they got there—or about any of the events that transpired the night before. Now Frankie and Ezra have to put aside old grievances in order to figure out what happened, what didn’t happen…and to ask themselves the most troubling question of all: what if they both got it wrong the first time around?
