The Changing Lives of Joe Hart, by Shawn Inmon
Joe Hart, a shut-in ever since his mother drank herself to death when he was eighteen, dies in his fifties due to never getting around to opening the box that contains a carbon monoxide detector.
He wakes up in his bedroom. He's eighteen again, his mother just died, and he has an entire life to live again. Maybe he can do some things differently. Like get therapy, volunteer at the animal shelter, make some friends, save his two stoner buddies who died in the Mount St. Helens eruption, and prevent the murder of his idol John Lennon...
I discovered this book while browsing Audible for freebies. I love the Peggy Sue Got Married sort of time travel, so I snatched it up. It was an excellent way to spend some driving time.
Very relatably, Joe does not remember the exact dates of almost any major events in his lifetime, which cuts down a lot on the number of things he can try to alter. But there's a few that he does recall, so he decides to go for those. But he's incredibly inept at altering anything but the events of his own personal life, and he spends quite a bit of time trying to do exactly that. When it comes to his stoner friends and John Lennon, he has a near-zero capacity to come up with any plan at all beyond warning them in a true but wildly unconvincing manner, or just showing up and hoping he'll get an idea at the last minute.
It's pretty hilarious when it comes to his stoner buddies, but it also made me spend a good chunk of the book mentally screaming, "Drug their coffee! Slash their tires! Call in a bomb threat! Call the cops and tell them the creepy weirdo with the book told you he has a gun and plans to shoot John Lennon!" and so forth.
However, what Joe lacks in Replay-style smarts he makes up in being a very decent human being, and he does a lot better once he gives up on meddling with other people's deaths and starts working on making people's lives better--"people" including himself and a whole lot of cats and dogs. A lot of the book isn't specifically about time travel, it's just following Joe as he goes to therapy, befriends the animals at the shelter, fixes up his house, throws block parties, and gradually becomes a part of a thriving community. It's sweet and cozy if you like that sort of thing, and I do.
Joe Hart is an entertaining, nicely worked out, touching look at a man who gets a second chance. It's book six in the Middle Falls time travel series, but it's the first one I read and stands on its own just fine, except for the part toward the end when suddenly a ghost/angel descends, stops time, gives Joe a brief therapy session, and takes off never to be heard from again. This was especially unexpected as there had been no previous hints that any outside agency was causing the time travel, or that anything supernatural was going on other than time travel. I assume this was set up in previous books.
I got the book on audio and it has the bonus of an unintentionally hilarious John Lennon impression.
Inmon is a self-published author, and while this series has some very commercial aspects, I wonder if it's too earnest and low-key for a traditional publisher to be interested. And yet those are the exact elements that make it appealing. It seems pretty successful in self-pub and I can see why; I now have the entire series on audio.
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He wakes up in his bedroom. He's eighteen again, his mother just died, and he has an entire life to live again. Maybe he can do some things differently. Like get therapy, volunteer at the animal shelter, make some friends, save his two stoner buddies who died in the Mount St. Helens eruption, and prevent the murder of his idol John Lennon...
I discovered this book while browsing Audible for freebies. I love the Peggy Sue Got Married sort of time travel, so I snatched it up. It was an excellent way to spend some driving time.
Very relatably, Joe does not remember the exact dates of almost any major events in his lifetime, which cuts down a lot on the number of things he can try to alter. But there's a few that he does recall, so he decides to go for those. But he's incredibly inept at altering anything but the events of his own personal life, and he spends quite a bit of time trying to do exactly that. When it comes to his stoner friends and John Lennon, he has a near-zero capacity to come up with any plan at all beyond warning them in a true but wildly unconvincing manner, or just showing up and hoping he'll get an idea at the last minute.
It's pretty hilarious when it comes to his stoner buddies, but it also made me spend a good chunk of the book mentally screaming, "Drug their coffee! Slash their tires! Call in a bomb threat! Call the cops and tell them the creepy weirdo with the book told you he has a gun and plans to shoot John Lennon!" and so forth.
However, what Joe lacks in Replay-style smarts he makes up in being a very decent human being, and he does a lot better once he gives up on meddling with other people's deaths and starts working on making people's lives better--"people" including himself and a whole lot of cats and dogs. A lot of the book isn't specifically about time travel, it's just following Joe as he goes to therapy, befriends the animals at the shelter, fixes up his house, throws block parties, and gradually becomes a part of a thriving community. It's sweet and cozy if you like that sort of thing, and I do.
Joe Hart is an entertaining, nicely worked out, touching look at a man who gets a second chance. It's book six in the Middle Falls time travel series, but it's the first one I read and stands on its own just fine, except for the part toward the end when suddenly a ghost/angel descends, stops time, gives Joe a brief therapy session, and takes off never to be heard from again. This was especially unexpected as there had been no previous hints that any outside agency was causing the time travel, or that anything supernatural was going on other than time travel. I assume this was set up in previous books.
I got the book on audio and it has the bonus of an unintentionally hilarious John Lennon impression.
Inmon is a self-published author, and while this series has some very commercial aspects, I wonder if it's too earnest and low-key for a traditional publisher to be interested. And yet those are the exact elements that make it appealing. It seems pretty successful in self-pub and I can see why; I now have the entire series on audio.
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