I wanted to like this book more than I did, and felt the description of the book a bit misleading. Maria is a psychiatrist, with two daughters and pregnant with her third son. When a patient warns Maria of an event that will happen, Maria doesn’t truly believe her. There is time travel here, but it is confusing, as Maria ends up back in her life as a seventeen year old. A Sophie’s choice will be hers when she has to choose to give her own warning to someone or return to her husband, Will and her family. Not my cup of tea, but thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

I enjoyed this book immensely but I am confused about the ending of this book to be honest !! I did enjoy the book overall though!!!

This was such an emotional read. I loved it! When I wasn’t reading it, I was thinking about it. It reminded me of one of my favorite books The Dream Daughter by Diane Chamberlain in the best way! Highly recommend!

This book wasn't really for me unfortunately.

It is very well written and was easy to follow along with, but I just didn't really feel one way or the other about the book or the characters.

Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this title.

I absolutely loved this one! One of my favorite resds is time travel so couldn't resist this one. It definitely gave me plenty to think about and would make an excellent book club discussion.

“‘Listen to the wind, it talks. Listen to the silence, it speaks. Listen to your heart, it knows.’” "Do you know that some cultures believe the wind carries our spirits back from death to be reborn again?"

There’s no ownership in this universe. We all belong to each other. We all take care of each other. You’ll see that, when you let go of that other world.

If you must have regrets in life, let them be for the things you’ve done and not the things you wish you’d done.’

She Wouldn’t Change A Thing is a solid debut by the author Sarah Adlakha about time travel and choices and the effects of those choices on the world and people around us. If people have a destiny or purpose and are given another chance to fulfill it by being sent back in time, would they go ahead with it even if it means saying goodbye to their current life and everything and everyone that are a part of it?

I kept delaying reading the ARC I was provided with more than two months ago but when I finally got around to reading it took me only a day to finish it! Which led me to wonder why I took so long to read it! It is quite an engaging, well written story, fluid in its flow with an ending which was both emotional and satisfactory. I shed tears through the entire Epilogue!

My thanks to NetGalley, the publisher MacMillan-Tor/Forge and the author Sarah Adlakha for the e-Arc of the book to read and review.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

A really interesting entry in the time travel sci fi genre, with elements of romance, and a heavy dose of book club-esque women’s fiction as well. The novel is peopled with solid characters. Our protagonist, Maria, had good “voice”. I really felt for Maria and the impossible choices and unusual struggles she had to deal with, as well as other intriguing characters who have to make life-altering, and heart-wrenching choices.

A fascinating premise, even though the time travel thing always frustrates my brain a bit. Some of the “science” of the story seemed a bit conflicting, as well. One other small thing is that the cover of She Wouldn’t Change a Thing is very similar to another book I ready recently, Diane Chamberlain’s The Dream Daughter, which also deals with time travel and unimaginable decisions. So, that kept wrenching my brain a bit whenever I’d pick it up.

But, overall, I really enjoyed the story. This tale had me seriously pondering mental health and whose right it is to determine what is normal and sane and what is not. If you can get me thinking about new things, or learning something new, then that is a good book!

Recommended for science fiction, women’s fiction, and book club fiction lovers.

Check out a letter from the Editor at Forge Books for some further insight into this great book and what went into writing it. Find it at: https://edelweiss-assets.abovethetreeline.com/MM/supplemental/She%20Wouldnt%20Change%20a%20Thing%20Letter.pdf

A big thank you to Sarah Adlakha, Forge Books, and NetGalley for providing a complimentary Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for this honest review.

To grab a copy of She Wouldn’t Change a Thing for yourself, head on over to www.BookShop.org – the online bookstore that gives 75% of each book’s profit margin back to independent bookshops. Find yours at https://bookshop.org/lists/best-fiction-of-2021.

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The book did not live up to the expectations I had set for it....it just fell flat. I was annoyed about the "you have a purpose and that's why your here" which was brought up over and over to the point of it getting annoying.

Time travel is such a mesmerising concept. Our fascination with returning to the past to relive precious moments, provide a heads up on the future (Humm lottery numbers), or prevent a devastating event keeps us enthralled in the many tales told. She Wouldn’t Change a Thing is a time travel story with a difference and an impossible choice at its heart; would you sacrifice the happy family life you currently have to save another innocent life?

Dr Maria Forssman is thirty-nine years old, a psychiatrist, married to Will, and has two daughters. She is also nine months pregnant with a baby boy. Maria’s life is chaotic managing her job, family matters, getting the children ready for school and all the requests for parent intervention. I felt embarrassed with the opening chapter with its vivid account of a wife/mother’s morning where the husband gets ready and runs out the door, leaving the house, children, appointments and for good measure, drops his appointment request on the lap of his wife.

When Maria arrives at her practice and encounters a patient, Sylvia, who explains she is from the future, there are steps Maria must take and steps she must not, including staying away from a storage unit they rent. Curiosity killed the cat, and it seems it wasn’t too kind to Maria either. After visiting the storage unit, seventeen-year-old Maria wakes up in her parents’ home in Alabama in 1988.

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander jumped to mind where returning to the future is nearly impossible, and people would think you crazy if you talked of time travel. Indeed, Maria’s parents are deeply concerned about her mental state and seek professional help, vividly painted with all its frustrations and worries. Likewise, this is not a story that regales with the adventures of a protagonist repeatedly travelling between different periods, but instead presents a stark heart-breaking choice; stay and lose your previous life or return and allow a devasting event to occur that could be unimaginable to live with. Which loss is greater? What can your conscience live with?

“The battle in her mind was exhausting, like she was fighting a duel between two sides that were perfectly matched rivals.”

The universe has a purpose in returning Maria to the past, and there is a personal connection. The dilemma is wonderfully drawn, equally convincing, and the emotions flood the pages in this tight plot.

Sarah Adlakha’s novel is sensitively thought-provoking, compelling and as realistic as time travel can be. We’ll never stop imagining the adventures of time travel, the fascination with the opportunities to right wrongs, and the life-changing insights that could be to our advantage. However, Adlakha used the concept to explore the unmanageable choices we could face if we know the consequences of what we did or did not do and the empty feeling of loss if we have to give up a happy and loving future.

I would highly recommend reading this book, and I want to thank Macmillan-Tor/Forge and NetGalley for providing me with a free ARC in return for an honest review.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I had to sit with this one for a few days before I wrote the review because I needed to reflect. Sometimes I can’t exactly describe why a book grabs me...it just does. This one snatched my attention from the first page. I read it in less than 48 hours because I simply could not put it down!

This story is incredible! It’s entertaining, thought provoking, gripping and it consistently kept me hanging on for what was next. In addition to being a great story, it’s both beautifully written and intelligently creative! I laughed and I cried multiple times throughout. This is a stunning debut by @SarahAdlakha and I genuinely cannot wait to see what she writes next!

She Wouldn’t Change a Thing

Sarah Adlakha



Wow pretty much expresses this unique, avant-garde debut novel, a real page turner that deals with time-travel, fate, karma and doing the right thing even if the cost is colossal. The story is told in two nonlinear timelines and even though readers are given insight into both they will often wonder to themselves what’s real. The audience will devour this book with its imaginative plot, flowing narrative, vivid scenes and unforgettable genuine characters. Maria is a well-developed character and the obvious star of the story but she has some really fantastic costars to help tell the tale. Fans of magical realism, time-travel and a can’t put it down it’s that interesting story will find this bound for the bestseller list, unputdownable. Plus they’ll find it hard to believe that this extremely talented storyteller has never written fiction before and hopes she writes more soon!

Maria Forssmann is a thirty-nine-year-old Psychiatrist, married mother of two and nine-months pregnant who receives a strange warning from a patient she thinks is suffering from psychosis that Maria should beware of her secretary. When that patient ends up committing suicide and Maria is visited by the police about it she decides to investigate the warning but instead wakes up inhabiting her seventeen-year-old self, in her childhood home with her parents not knowing how it happened. She’s pretty sure she’s not losing her mind but when she tries to remember she knows there are things missing but has retained most of the memories from her real life and now she’s just got to figure out how to get back there.

Very interesting look at the possibilities that exist when a 39 year old wife and Mother, wakes up as a 17 year old! Knowing what she knows and wanting to get back to her husband and children. Kept me interested from the first to the last page.

DNF at 10%. I was drawn in by the premise of Life After Life meets Sliding Doors. Unfortunately I feel like this was the wrong way to pitch this book and sent me in with the wrong expectations. This really isn’t working for me and I’m going to stop reading here. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the free ebook to review.

Really enjoyed this story! It was a great twist and it kept me guessing all along as to what was going to happen.

Dr. Maria Forssmann is a busy woman. She is a psychiatrist and her husband Will is a surgeon. They have 2 young girls and Maria is very pregnant with their son. She is struggling to get everything done herself, to take care of the girls’ school projects, to buy the groceries, to take care of her patients. She is very happy with her life, but she does sometimes forget that while dealing with all the details of a busy life.

And then she gets a visit from a new patient. Sylvia comes in with a story that is quite literally unbelievable. Sylvia tells Maria that she is there from the future. She’s not an intentional time traveler, just someone who got caught in a loop somehow. And while Maria’s training is telling her that Sylvia is schizophrenic, her patient says something that stops Maria in her tracks. She tells the doctor that her assistant is going to shoot her that weekend.

Maria is unsettled and confused, knowing that her assistant would never shoot her on purpose, but Sylvia told her not to go to the storage unit she has. The shooting happens at the storage unit, and Maria doses not survive. Maria is stopped for a second, barely remembering that she even had a storage unit and bringing up a forgotten memory of letting her assistant use it for a while. But how could Sylvia know any of that? It doesn’t seem possible. Unless Sylvia is telling the truth about somehow coming back form the future.

But Maria still has trouble believing her, so she goes to the storage unit that weekend to check on it. At some point, she loses consciousness. She remembers bright lights in her face and the sound of her husband’s voice. And then she falls back asleep. When she wakes up, she’s at home.

Only it’s not the home of the 39-year-old mother, wife, and psychiatrist. It’s the home she grew up in, and the mirror shows her that she is 17 again. All she can think to ask about is her son, the boy who was ready to come into the world just as she lost 22 years of her life. She steals her parent’s car and heads for the house she lives in, in her future life. But there’s nothing there. The neighborhood she lives in with Will and her daughters doesn’t even exist yet.

But then she meets Henry. She feels like maybe she knows him somehow, but more importantly, he understands what she’s saying about coming back from the future. Because he did too. As Maria figures out more about where she is in time and why, she realizes that she has a purpose in this timeline. And there may be a way for her to get back to her life. But she can’t go back if she fulfills her purpose. And if she doesn’t fulfill her purpose and makes it back to her original life, will she be able to live with herself knowing about the suffering she caused by ignoring what she was supposed to do?

She Wouldn’t Change a Thing is a mind0bending travel through the life (lives?) of characters who go from one life to another with the memories of their last go-around. Author Sarah Adlakha has created a complicated plot that weaves around itself and takes you to completely unexpected places.

This is not an easy book to read. It demands a lot of the reader, both as far as understanding the tricky movement of the plot and for dealing with the powerful emotional journey that these characters undertake. It is worth it to get to the end, because that is very fulfilling, but the journey there is draining and a little confusing. The marketing copy compares She Wouldn’t Change a Thing with the movie Sliding Doors. I love that movie, and while there is some overlap in the way you see the different life choices and how they effect the characters, but this book makes you take a far more difficult trek to the happy ending. It’s a worthwhile adventure, but a dangerous one. Pack lots of snacks and drinks for the trip, and have fun!

Egalleys for She Wouldn’t Change a Thing were provided by Macmillan’s Forge Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.

The premise of this one and what it actually was feels very misaligned. So much so that I couldn't finish it (and maybe if I had continued it would have finally all come together). There was a much bigger religious aspect that was really hard for me to get past, so at about 30% I had to put it down. I was hoping for a book that did something interest with time (the Sliding Doors comparison is at fault for that) but what it seemed like was a woman grappling with her past and how her faith made her reimagine what it might have been. Not for me.

She Wouldn't Change a Thing by Sarah Adlakha is an intriguing story above life, love and sacrifice. With writing that's captivating, a fascinating well-thought out plot and well developed, relatable characters, I found myself totally engrossed with every page.

Twisty, thought provoking and completely absorbing. Highly recommended. I really enjoyed it.

Maria is thrown when she finds herself back in her teenage body. She does not know how long she has, but she knows she must get back to her career and her life. She loves her life and does not want to do anything to change her past and potentially damage her future.

I really enjoyed the beginning of this book and the whole set up of why and how 39-year old Maria wakes up in her own bed, but her 17-year old bed. The confusion and frustration she felt were well depicted initially, but then I just felt like that just kept going on and on with just slight variations in what was happening. I liked the ending a lot, but the middle really dragged for me!

Cool premise, but kind of boring overall. I didn't much care what Maria did or didn't do by the end. That said, the writing was lovely, and I'd definitely read another book by this author.