Lynnie 
contemporary fantasy, magical realism
In Evelyn Skye's Ideal Life, Talia Morgan is an
idealistic tech whiz, about to sell her startup company which creates
wearable tech featuring a personal assistant that helps individuals
analyze and adjust their habits and decisions to be their best selves.
After discovering a bug in the software, Talia wakes up with a
mysterious watch on her wrist and discovers that she can rewind time.
After going back in time to fix the bug, Talia begins to reverse time to
experiment with making other corrections to her life. As you can
imagine, things don't go as well as she would like and, as every movie
and book have ever warned, the fallout of these timeline changes are
unpredictable for Talia, her company and everyone else in her life.
I
loved Skye's previous novel, The Incredible Kindness of Paper, so my
hopes were high for Ideal Life. Unfortunately, while I liked this story,
I also found it frustrating. The idea of it was really intriguing, but I
found much of the story repetitive and predictable, and never really
connected with any of the characters. Some aspects of the book were
never properly explained, and others were over-explained to the point
that I found myself skipping paragraphs just to get through.
There
are multiple points of view in this book and I found myself wondering
if that was necessary. Did Erin the intern's viewpoint add anything to
the narrative? Honestly, not really. However, I did love the connection
of this book to Chloe and Oliver from The Incredible Kindness of Paper -
that section made me smile more than anything else in this novel, which
might say more about this book than anything.
I do think the
overall message of this novel is an important one, living in the moment
and not allowing technology to control us. But I fear that it gets lost
in some of the meandering plot points.
Ideal
Life will publish on August 18, 2026. Thank you to Atria Books,
NetGalley and Evelyn Skye for the advanced reader copy in exchange for
an honest review.
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