Ugh, no no no no no.

The main character in this is the worst. She was so whiny and unlikable which made it hard to root for her at all in the story. Her ultimate life just felt based in hot men and money which fair if that's what you truly want but the author's kept making it out like that wasn't really what the character *truly* wanted and so the whole thing just felt shitty.

I think that there are plenty of other books that do the multiple life possibilities so much better than this and with more nuance and commentary. This felt so surface level. Also, the treatment of Geeta, the seemingly only person of color in this story, felt really icky and weird especially with where she ends up at the end of the book. It actually shocked me that the book could end that way and no one would have said anything throughout the publishing pipeline. Gross.

“Do you ever feel like your life doesn’t measure up to everyone else’s - and wonder if you just didn’t get the memo helping you make the right choices?”
This line from the synopsis of The Memo is the best way to summarize how The Memo begins. Jenny is dreading her college reunion at a small college in upstate New York. It seems most of her classmates are doing amazing things, but she is stuck in a job she doesn’t like with a boyfriend who is cheating on her (again). Come to realize, there is a reason for her situation - her female classmates all got “The Memo” from an organization located on their college campus telling them what to do to live their best realized lives, but Jenny missed out on getting hers. Once she attends the reunion, she is offered experimenting with their new technology to go back to key moments in her past to correct the wrong decisions she made, so long as they are done in the few days before she turns 36, the age where adulthood apparently finalizes.
While the plot seemed a little far out when I first saw this book, I was enthralled by the book and didn’t put it down much once I started reading. I empathized with Jenny, and I was cheering her on throughout. I particularly loved the ending. Thanks to Harper Perennial and NetGalley for an early copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

This was a thought-provoking, feminist second chance at life story that has a women about to turn 37 going to her college reunion where she discovers she missed out on "the memo" everyone else receives that helps them make the best life decisions for the most optimal life.

Able to correct all her biggest regrets, Jenny Green travels back in time to fix the things that caused her the most grief, only to learn that true cost of following the memo wasn't worth the price of her dearest friendships.

Highly entertaining and perfect for fans of books like A special place for women by Laura Hankin, this was good on audio and would make a great book club pick! Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early digital copy in exchange for my honest review!

Great novel, but the pacing was a bit off for me. It felt a bit inconsitent and struggled to keep my attention. However, I really enjoyed the general plotline and most of the characters.

A light, fun read. Jenny is not living the life she wants and is a little stuck. As her college reunion is approaching she starts receiving messages that are confusing to her. What is “The Memo”, what does it mean and would she, if she could go back and change things? It’s an easy enjoyable read that will definitely make you think a little bit about some of the untraveled paths, but also appreciate the ones you’ve ventured down. Interesting concept.

This was a cool premise; not getting the memo being the reason your life is so off track? But also? I wanted to shake our main character and tell her to MAKE A CHANGE. So, while the idea was cool, I was more frustrated than anything. The MC lets life happen to her and is like, Oh, OK. Cool. That's life I guess?! NO.

This book was so funny and a breath of fresh air. It was so easy to relate to Jenny. She’s really dreading her college reunion. It’s like if you could rewrite your story, would you dare? When life doesn’t go as planned, sometimes it feels like you didn’t get the memo of the right choices to make. This book was so good. It’s about life, love, friendship, etc.

I felt so much of this book personally. Her full fledged middle life break down is so relatable. Not knowing who you truly are or why you're not as successful as your closest friends. I have struggled the last few years trying to find my place & figure out who I am just like her in this story. It’s very very relatable. Overall this has a VERY interesting story line. One filled with self doubt, a bit of "magic" and a world of "what if" things had been different and "what if" we had the chance to go back and change things.

What you'll find in this story:
⭐ Second Chances
⭐ Self doubt and self preservation
⭐ Friendship
⭐ Evolving relationships
⭐ Time Travel
⭐ A touch of Romance

All that to say, I definitely could tell this was written by two different authors. Not as fluid as reading a Christina Lauren novel. While the underlying theme and overarching storyline was a fun premise it at times felt dragged out. In chapter one I was skimming. I wanted to get to the jump a bit quicker, I would have loved more character development of all characters. While we find some of the information out that we need to fully understand the story & plot, it comes in a few cases too late. I love the idea of 2nd chances, of having the chance to redo parts of life, of having a chance to maybe change the direction of life OR just be given the chance to see how it could be different. Especially if we are able to see it if we didn't let fear impact decision making or failure!

All that to say it is a fun read. It is witty, funny at times and really sheds light on figuring out who you are and not second guessing.

Synopsis:
"Do you ever feel like your life doesn’t measure up to everyone else’s—and wonder if you just didn’t get the memo helping you make the right choices?

Jenny Green dreads her upcoming college reunion. Once top of her class, the thirty-five-year-old finds herself stuck in a life that isn’t the one she expected. Her promising career has flamed out (literally) and her deadbeat boyfriend is cheating on her (again). All her friends seem to have it all figured it out, enjoying glittering lives and careers that she can only envy from the sidelines. Did she just not get the memo they all did?

As it turns out, she didn’t!

When she arrives at her alma mater for the festivities, she receives a text from an unlisted number.

“Jenny Green: please collect your memo.”

Somewhere on campus, a discreet female-led organization provides comprehensive memos to select students, a set of instructions that are a blueprint for success.

The first time around, Jenny didn’t receive hers. Now, she’s being given the second chance she wants—an opportunity to relive her life and make all the right decisions this time around. But at what price?"

Shout out to Netgalley + Harper Perennial for the eARC! We appreciate you and the opportunities to share in storytelling!

The Memo is the story of Jenny Green who seemingly chose the wrong forks in the road in her post-college life and then we find out that she failed to get "The Memo" which would have led her down a different more successful track. The bulk of the story is about Jenny getting a do-over before her 36th birthday. Of course, no path is totally clear and easy and Jenny's key relationships are in play and she has serious choices to make along this new path.

I think the book was trying to ask some serious questions but it is a rom/com version and basically a fun light read. I liked the story and characters though sometimes I could see the two writers at work.
All in all an interesting summer read.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of The Memo in exchange for an honest review. The Memo is available now.

Holy cow, I loved this book. I'm a sucker for what-if, alternate future books and this one was done so well. Jenny is sympathetic and while she's taken some missteps to get where she is, there's nothing pathetic about her. She just seems like someone who is so close to getting it right and finding the success she wants. Her successful friends are the right mix of aspirational and a little bitchy while still seeming real. This was such a great read and I so enjoyed it.

I really enjoyed this book! I was worried the time-travel aspect would be confusing, but I thought it was really well-plotted. This is the story of Jenny, who has made some mistakes (or what she believes to be mistakes) and feels a little bit stuck; she heads back to college for her 15-year reunion, only to be surrounded by her hugely successful classmates. Turns out, a shadowy organization called the Consortium handed out memos to her classmates, and following the memos has propelled her classmates to their unbelievable successes.

As Jenny is given the opportunity to follow her own memo, she has to make decisions along the way. What’s worth giving up?

My favorite part of this book was the friendship between Jenny and Geeta. Although there are romantic relationships in the book, the core relationship is the one between Jenny and Geeta. At every step, Jenny’s view of her relationship with Geeta changes, but it also grounds her and acts as her North Star throughout most of the book.

The ending was extremely satisfying! The authors wrapped everything up so nicely. I would definitely recommend this to a friend!

Jenny Green, a Coleman graduate, thinks she’s a failure: she’s struggling in a job she hates with an unreasonable boss, she has a strained relationship with her mother, and her boyfriend seems to be cheating on her with their neighbour. Meanwhile, all the people she went to Coleman with seem to be the paragons of success in their various fields. Frustrated, Jenny rants to her acapella friend Gabe that it’s like she didn’t “get the Memo”, hence why she’s so behind everyone else. Her complaint triggers mystery texts in her phone, confirming that she indeed didn’t “get the Memo”, a literal Memo by an organisation of women called the Consortium, who have tabbed Jenny as an epic failure and want to test out their new time travel method on her. She will be given the chance to undo her past mistakes, following the advice she receives from her Memos without question, and she will finally get to stand among the ranks of her fellow Coleman alumni.

Here’s my honest reaction: about 30% in, I thought I was going to hate this. I thought it was some self-pitying do-over in the name of girlboss white feminism; I thought Jenny Green was immature and whiny and that it wasn’t at all believable that she would be turning 36 in a week’s time; I thought the Consortium was bullshit in all their talk about equalising the playing field for women (felt a lot like bioessentialism and lack of intersectionality to me) yet the only ones they helped were university women whom they deemed as having massive potential to make waves around the world—not waves for social change, just “revolutionary” business ideas like expensive vegan bowl services. I didn’t know whether to take this as unserious and satirical or self-indulgent fantasising, and I was tempted to simply DNF it—but it was an easy read in terms of pacing, so I stuck with it to the end.

I’m glad I decided to commit to reading this book to the end because, as both Jenny and I come to realise, the Consortium is *not* really here to help women and equalise the playing field; it’s here to enforce and dictate a certain lifestyle for the women who subscribe to their Memos, pushing them to achieve material success at the cost of their own selves and their actual relationships, pushing for toxic individualism and rivalry between women. When Jenny’s best friend seems to be interfering with what they see as her success, the Consortium’s response is to write her off and remove her from the narrative, once again through a Memo. It’s more like a girlbossing capitalistic cult in the name of feminism than actual feminism about trying to remove barriers and giving women an actual choice in what they want to do with their lives.

All this is to say that this book surprised me by defying my expectations. I think the way it’s marketed, along with the choice of cover art, is deceptive; I initially thought it was really just about Jenny managing to undo her past “mistakes” to become successful, yet I came to see it as a critique of white girlboss feminism and individualism, and how they have been co-opted by neoliberal capitalism. It is about a woman’s resistance to those expectations of the way her narrative “should” have gone because of all her supposed untapped potential. My only real critique of it is perhaps in its tokenistic approach to representation: we have one lesbian (Leigh Sullivan) and one woman of colour (Geeta Brara); I didn’t even know Geeta was POC until Jenny explicitly mentioned it, but even then, I don’t know anything about Geeta’s ethnicity or culture other than that she is a person of colour.

This was so fun! It made me reflect on my own high school reunion an d made me think about if there is anything I would change.

Jenny Green feels like a loser. While her friends from college have gone on to get married, have successful careers, make a lot of money, and hang out with famous people, Jenny has a job at a fundraiser that she’s half-hearted about and a boyfriend that she thinks is cheating on her with a neighbor. And her 15th college reunion is coming up. She wants to go to the reunion to see her two best friends from college, but she can’t help but feel like everyone else got the memo about how to be successful in life except for her.

And then the text comes through on her phone. You’re right. You didn’t get the memo.

Jenny wonders if she’s losing her mind. How could someone else know that she’d just been thinking that? But she shrugs it off and heads out of town to the reunion. Once she’s there, she finds her old roommates, Leigh and Geeta. And she also meets up with Desiree, an independent career counselor Jenny had met shortly before her graduation all those years ago. Desiree is the one who had texted Jenny about the memo, and she says that there is still time for Jenny to change her life.

Back when they’d first met, Desiree had encouraged Jenny to drop out of school. Jenny had refused, but she had gone on to win a prestigious baking fellowship in Italy, where she had accidentally burned down a historic bakery. But Desiree is offering her the chance to go back and change her life, starting with that fateful day at the bakery. Jenny takes that chance, and finds herself traveling in time back to that day, setting things right and changing the course of her life.

Desiree tells Jenny that her 36th birthday is the key, that she can makes changes to her life up to that date, but after she turns 36, her life’s trajectory will be set. As the weeks go by, Jenny finds herself bouncing back and forth between the life she could have had, making course corrections that will end on her being incredibly successful, and the loser life she’d been living in Pittsburgh. But she also finds that some of the choices she finds herself contractually obligated to make takes her away from the person she wants to be. Jenny realizes that she can be successful beyond her wildest dreams, or she can be true to herself.

Which path will she choose?

The Memo is a fascinating look at what could have been from authors Rachel Dodes and Lauren Mechling. This story bounces back and forth through time, and offers a glimpse of the kind of life that takes you towards crazy success verses a life that is genuine and heartfelt. The time travel in the narrative adds tension, since every time Jenny jumps from one timeline to the other, she has to figure out what has changed and adapt to her new life in minutes. And there is always the question of where Jenny will end up when it’s all over. And I never would have guessed where that turned out to be.

I went into this book knowing that there is a lot of buzz around it, as readers try to figure out what their own memo might have said. And as a big fan of the movie Sliding Doors and the book Oona Out of Order, I had high expectations for The Memo. But as it turns out this one wasn’t quite like those stories. There is some overlap, but because Jenny’s choices when she jumps back in time changes both of her timelines, there is extra tension each time she’s back home in Pittsburgh to find out what’s changed for her in that story.

I really got sucked into this story, and I loved it. The more times Jenny went back in time, the more changes she made to her old story, and the more things changed in her Pittsburgh timeline because of that, the more I wanted to find out more. I thought this was such a clever idea for storytelling, and it really worked for me. I do think that you need to read this book pretty quickly, or maybe even read it twice, to keep track of all the people and all the changes that were happening, and since I got so absorbed in the story so quickly, that was not a problem for me. I think this book is really clever and will start some interesting conversations for book clubs or even just for twentysomethings to take a hard look at their life choices and how things might unfold for them. But I do recommend this one, and I hope readers love it as much as I did.

Egalleys for The Memo were provided by Harper Perennial through NetGalley, with many thanks.

The Memo by Rachel Dodes; Lauren Mechling was truly an engaging story.
It was unique and so interesting.
What an unexpectedly fun read this was!
This book is wonderfully written; an intriguing storyline with strong characters.
The characters are well described and portrayed.
I could feel every single emotion just seep off the page.

Thank You NetGalley and Harper Perennial for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this amazing eARC!

4.5 Stars
Genre - women's fiction, relationship fiction / romance subplots, magical realism/speculative fiction, comedy/satire
Tone - whimsical, unassuming, satirical
Tropes & devices - time travel/alternate realities/do-over; second chance romance; "good for her"; coming-of-age
Reps - main character reads straight & white; one secondary character is queer/lesbian, another (Geeta) is vaguely "brown skinned" or "a woman of color" (possibly Indian).
CW - pandemic mention; cheating; sexism; some sexual content; mentions of dieting/body image; adult language; alcohol consumption; drug consumption.

Jenny has watched her two best friends from college outgrow and outshine her for years; it makes her wonder why she never got the memo, the secret to success and happiness they seem to know instinctively. Right before her 36th birthday, though, The Memo finally arrives - the specific daily instructions that have the potential to set her back on track to reach her full potential. But as she changes the course of her life's trajectory one regretful slip up at a time, she begins to ask questions about feminism, supporting other women, finding happiness, and having it all.

I had a hunch from the beginning where the plot was going - these sorts of narratives tend to follow a pretty formulaic pattern - but the ending pleasantly surprised me and the journey Jenny took was relatable (and full of secondhand embarrassment). It's a great read for anyone who feels stagnant, behind, or misfit in their career or relationship. For folks who like this one or want to explore similar themes, I'd suggest The Museum of Ordinary People or The Lonely Hearts Book Club; if this book was too simple and sweet for you, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility also explores themes of class and opportunity in an even more out-there way.

The Memo-a standalone

By Rachel Dodes &Lauren Mechling-debut authors

Rating: 3.5/5 ⭐⭐⭐½

Publication 6/18/24, Read 6/16/24

Format: e-book, 336 pgs.

Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Perennial for this ARC🧡! I voluntarily give an honest review and all opinions expressed are my own.

✔️Time Travel
✔️ fantasy
✔️ Adult/Women's Fic
✔️ 2nd chances
✔️ romance

Summary: Jenny Green wanted more out of life from her career, her love life, and her overall happiness. She is unfulfilled at her nonprofit job, has a cheating boyfriend, and feels something's missing. At her college's 15th year reunion with BFFs Geeta and Leigh, she takes a walk down memory and meets a "career counselor" from her past-Desiree. Jenny never followed The Memo where she could be at the right place at the right time to get the most out of life. She missed out on a better life filled with potential- until now. She agrees to follow Desiree's meet cutes, and ends up successful and married with children. Will the cost be worth it?


Overall, I liked the concept but it felt like I read this already. Cassandra in Reverse had similar themes and it reminded me of the movie "Click." The female powers trying to elevate other women was inspiring, but could have been done more realistically. Clearly Jenny had self esteem issues and did the worst thing possible-comparing her life to others on social media. It never gives the whole picture of someone's life, and I can say with certainty it's not real.

Jenny Green is not looking forward to her upcoming reunion and hearing all her friends success stories. She doesn’t have much to say other than her boyfriend is cheating on her and she hates the way her life turned out. Why does her friends seem to have it all together? Jenny gets a weird text on her phone which leads her to a major life decision. If she could go back and change major events in her life would she want to? It kind of feels like she’s selling her soul to the devil. Jenny must decide if she wants things to continue the way they have been going or walk on the wild side and see what happens.
This story felt like a modern day “Back to the Future”. Definitely made me think about what decision I would make if given the opportunity!

I absolutely loved this debut novel co-written by Rachel Dodes. and Lauren Mechling. As a huge fan of “do-over” and magical realism type stories, this was a compelling read that I could not put down. Have you ever wondered if you missed “the memo” or “what if?” At her 15th college reunion, Jenny gets the chance find out, and the reader gets to go on that amazing ride with her. The comps to Rebecca Serle and Emma Straub were spot on, as I can totally see fans of these authors enjoying this book. Would make a great movie, aka Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow from back in the day. I hope to see more from this wriitng duo in the future!

Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Perennial for the eARC.

This started off funny and irreverent but then it got just a bit too far-fetched to hold my attention. It was a touch too long and I didn't always understand the plot. Still, there were moments that some will enjoy a lot. Hope you have better luck!

The Memo comes out tomorrow on June 18, 2024 and you can purchase HERE.

"Hey there," I said, "your old friend Jenny Green here. You remember me, the eco-chic econ major, raging against the machine, writing papers on Engels while dreaming of becoming America's favorite artisanal baker?" I paused and thought about what to reveal next. "You probably read about how I burned down an Italian bakery right after college. Not just any Italian bakery-an official UNESCO cultural heritage site. Impressive, am I right?