Review Detail

“Rewind to Us” by Molly Morris takes readers on a time travel-like journey as they explore the life of Dixie Mulligan. While Dixie has secrets that are surprising, to say the least, she keeps them to herself when she goes each summer to her aunt’s home in Cielo Springs, California. There, she visits with her aunt, her cousin, and her best friend, Sawyer, while they all work together at her aunt’s old movie theater, the Trip. Dixie’s time there is precious and she does everything in her power to ensure that her life back home in New York doesn’t interfere with her life in Cielo Springs.

One of Dixie’s secrets that only her family knows about is the ability they each have to enact one “rewind” in their lives. This allows them to go back to one moment within the last year of their life that they would like to change for some reason or other. It isn’t a willy nilly decision, either. There is an impact report, a movie made to show what the results might look like, and the person enacting the rewind even has the ability to decide not to do it within a four-day period before it comes to fruition.

Dixie desperately wants to go back to the time in Central Park when she was planning to meet Sawyer and they were going to have the chance to be together as a couple. Since this moment didn’t go to plan, she has been frustrated with herself for how it transpired, and she longs to make a change. Before she has the chance, though, circumstances beyond her control get in the way, marked by a couple of major twists that readers will likely not even see coming.

The lives of Dixie and her family and friends could be changed forever with one simple rewind, or they could find that talking things out and being together more might be at least part of the ticket to reconciling and dealing with issues that the rewind might confuse all the more.

The story is one of nerves, hope, strength, worry, kindness, truth, and love. Molly Morris has written a compelling, creative story that any lover of contemporary young adult romance and time travel will be eager to pick up and will find difficult to put down!