Replay by Ken Grimwood Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Replay
Book Review: One of my ALL TIME FAVORITE books!
Summary: 5 Stars
There are many reviews that give an excellent rehash of this incredible book! The main character dies at age 43 at the beginning of the story, only to "awaken" in his college dorm room 20 years earlier with complete memory and knowledge of the future. What a concept! And this happens to him over and over and over again. He has the chance to live wildly different lives each time based on knowledge and wisdom he acquires through each new 20 year span. He can avoid mistakes and try new options. And halfway through our story he meets a woman who is also "replaying". They fall in love and find each other to replay each new incarnation. The whole idea I find fascinating. I've entertained myself on countless occassions imagining what I might do differently if given the gift of replaying. It would be very interesting to wake up in my college dorm room with my whole life to live over again, with all the knowledge that I have now, at my disposal then! How many roads untaken would I go down, and what would those lives be like? Wonderful story, fascinating ideas, highly recommended reading.........Book Review: What A Book!
Summary: 5 Stars
After a long time of settling for mediocre books and abandoning them halfway, this novel came out of nowhere to hit me on the head.
What a book. What a story. What great writing.
Don't dare miss this one. You'll never know what you are missing. And I'm going to do something I have never done before: read a book for the second time.
It's that good.
Book Review: Ok, just rather slow....
Summary: 2 Stars
After reading the reviews here, I was ready for a great book. Unfortunately, I found myself rather bored after the first loop and almost left it on the plane 1/2 way through. (Ending up finishing it on the return flight since our movie was broken).
The concept of exploring alternative ways your could live your life is quite intriguing, but the story didn't click for me. Believable characters, just dull.
Of course, I generally like fast-paced techno thrillers and this was a slow, drawn-out, very non-technical drama. I would've much preferred if the bad guy they meet was much more intertwined throughout the plot to at least explore different perspectives on replaying one's life.
Book Review: A very thoughtful, credible fantasy
Summary: 4 Stars
What would you do if you had your life to live over again? Would you marry the same person? Take the same jobs? Would you try to change the course of history? For Jeff Winston, the protagonist of Ken Grimwood's 1986 novel Replay, these questions are more than theoretical. After dying in 1988, at the age of 43, Jeff wakes up 25 years earlier in his dorm room at Emory. Without understanding why the clock has rewound for him, he lives the same quarter century again, making different mistakes against a familiar historical and cultural backdrop--Kennedy's assassination and Vietnam, the Beatles and Watergate, Patty Hearst and disco and Iran-Contra.
What would you do if you had your life to live over again...again? Come October 18th, 1988, his second time through, Jeff finds himself powerless to prevent his death, despite his foreknowledge of the event. When he wakes up again in 1963, with everything he accomplished in the last 25 years erased, this "second chance" at life seems more curse than gift.
We've all wondered, I'm sure, what we might do differently given a second shot at life. But Grimwood's exploration of the common fantasy goes far beyond superficial what-ifs. He has so thoroughly imagined his character's bizarre predicament that the story, fantastic in its premise, is wholly credible, and the choices Jeff makes across successive lifetimes, sometimes radically different, are rendered fully understandable. Grimwood also wrings surprising pathos from the story:
"He couldn't bring himself to see Judy again. This sweet-faced adolescent girl was not the woman he had loved, but merely a blank slate with the potential to become that woman. It would be pointless, even masochistic, to repeat by rote that process of mutual becoming, when he knew too well the emotional and spiritual death to which it all would lead."
The characters' musings on the metaphysics of Jeff's situation can slow Grimwood's narrative, but otherwise this is a thoroughly enjoyable fantasy.
-- Debra Hamel
Book Review: Incredible book
Summary: 5 Stars
I completely 100% agree with the reviewer before me. He hit the nail right on the head and took the words right out of my mouth.
I would, however, like to address a past review by Steven M. Anthony (Arkansas)(01-15-07)...
He knocked the book, in a nice way, for using the time loop storyline and compared it to "Groundhog Day" and "the Butterfly Effect", but what he failed to realize (or possibly just ignored) is that "Replay" was published in 1986, while the former was released in 1993 and the latter in 2004, therefore the time loop idea used for the story came long before either movies mentioned. If anything, the movies copied the idea from the book. This book was VERY well done, amazingly some might say (I surely do), but to even mention the "overdone premise" part is just wrong. Next time you are going to politely knock something in a review, at least make sure that your statements make sense.
But, as Matthew N. Marting so perfectly stated, (kudos Matt)
Buy it. Read it. Tell all your friends about it. Trust me.