IN ONE LIFE AND OUT ANOTHER

In Mercer’s YA novel, a teenage girl’s life unfolds in parallel timelines.

Do you ever wonder how your life could have gone if just one thing had been different? In one version of Marin Greene’s life, her parents are divorced. She’s just received a car for her 17th birthday (from her dad, of course), and she’s planning to use it to spend as much time away from her overbearing mother as possible. Her best friend has been Hannah since the two of them stopped hanging out with their third musketeer, Whitney, as soon as the three got to high school. Marin’s biggest problem—other than deciding where to go to college—is that she and Hannah both have crushes on the same guy: a truck-driving, soccer-playing fellow named Sam Hanson. In another version of Marin’s life, her parents never divorced, though she still battles with her overbearing mother on a near daily basis. This Marin spends most of her time smoking cigarettes in the park with her boy-crazy best friend, Whitney, and working at a grocery store with Sam Hanson. Sam clearly likes Marin, though he’s also the No. 1 desire of her ex-friend, golden girl Hannah. Is it possible that the two different versions of Marin’s life could end up in the same place? The two timelines are demarcated through the use of different fonts, and the author does an impressive job crafting two distinct Marins—one bolder, one more timid—who nevertheless feel like the same person. The prose is always alive, as when Marin (who loves to dance in both timelines) shows Sam her moves: “I sank into the motions immediately. Lifting up, folding over, then up again. Swinging an arm out to the side, and most of my body with it, then the other. Spin, collapse, rolling up off my toes, reaching and reaching and folding and hurting—the song was about being trapped, trying to get out, get free….” The story compellingly demonstrates how human relationships are always multifaceted, no matter how history shakes out.

A well-crafted YA novel about the various ways one makes it to adulthood.