This turned out not to be my kind of book. I Just couldn't get into it and found it hard to read and did not finish it.

A lot of fun pop culture from the past as Peter tries to navigate mysteriously going back in time. Quick and funny, a good way to pass some time.

Painfully tedious read. Nothing enjoyable for me about this story at all. The characters were annoying, the prattling on about classmates was unbelievable, the plot was messy. Right now I couldn't tell you any stories about high school or grade school classmates in such detail as the characters in the book seem to recall.

Fifty in Reverse was such a fun read!! I loved all the flashback music references and the premise that an old guy can have a chance for a do-over. I wish there had been a bit of story before and after the first and last chapters that featured more of the side of Pete as an actual 65 year old because it would’ve helped me to buy into the ‘back to the future’ element a little more, though, now that I am thinking further on it, maybe it really was all in his head?? Either way, it is an interesting little tale asking that question I think all of us would want a chance to answer: if you had the chance to go back and try again, would you take it?? I think I might.
Thank you to NetGalley and to the author and publisher for the chance to read Fifty in Reverse!!

4.5 Stars!

Oh my gosh! This book was so good I sat down after supper and read it in one sitting. This book had me feeling all the feels. I was laughing and sad and reminiscing. I really enjoyed the way things play out, the story has a bit of irony and symmetry to it that was very well done. It’s a heart-touching story that has some humour, and deals with a lot of issues people faced back in the day.(I was 4 in 1970) I could definitely relate to some of Peter’s struggles. This is a very short book at 166 pages but a lot is packed into those pages so it is still a very satisfying read.

Overall this was a very engaging and interesting story. I enjoyed the discussion around the different issues and loved the fantasy element. I am not a big science fiction fan but I love time travel stories. This was a funny, creative, and heart-warming read. It wasn’t the kind of thing I normally read as I am a thriller buff but I think fans of time travel, historical fiction or coming of age stories will find a lot here to like. I would have gladly given it five stars but the ending was a teeny, tiny disappointing.

I really liked this time travel (Hiccup? Blip?) story about Peter, a 65-year-old man who wakes up one day to find it's 1970, he's 15, and back in high school. But he remembers everything from his life and misses his wife and kids and his life in 2020.

After trying to time-jump by doing something completely disruptive and failing, Pete decides to accept his new reality and make the most of his do-over life. And then history starts to rewrite itself. The Beatles don't break up. The Viet Nam war ends years ahead of time. And Pete has to work hard to remember all the details of his 65-year-old self.

So, is he crazy? Has he gotten a glimpse of the future or a second chance at the past? This book will keep you guessing while always pulling for Peter. Lots of nods to 1970 history and reimagining how things could have gone.

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader's copy in exchange for an honest review.

I received this book "Fifty in Reverse" from NetGalley and all opinions expressed are my own. The story was very interesting and I kept reading to find out what would happen. It felt like going back in time and I could relate to the things happening in Peter's past life. Definitely an interesting book. I was hoping for more at the end.

An interesting book with a great premise. It would have been 5 starts but the ending was a let down and left me feeling like I wasn’t quite sure what had really happened.

Peter Wyatt is a 65 year old man who wakes up in April of 1970 in his 15 year old body. After 3 days of what he believes to be is a dream he attempts to shock himself awake by stripping naked in his high school algebra class. This is where the story begins with Peter's first meeting with Harvard psychiatrist Terry Canyon as he tries to explain his displacement. He recounts to Terry a brief history from 1970 to the year 2020 but as events begin to unfold he realizes that his current reality is not matching with his memories. The Beatles are still a band, Nixon has success in Vietnam and if this is not a dream then are his memories of his wife and children real?

This was an entertaining and compelling novel that was very hard for me to put down. The question of the novel is which reality is real for Peter. There are many clues that suggest his memories aren't fabricated but the altered state of reality suggests otherwise. The question of what happens when we die is also tackled in an interesting fashion as well as coping with one's mortality. My complaint with this book though is that the book felt extremely short for the subject matter. I felt very little connection to Peter or his plight. The story line was very interesting and I wanted to know what would happen, but I didn't necessarily care one way or other. I would have liked to have gotten to know Peter's wife and children, to know more about Peter's life as an adult and how it changed his life view. I would have liked to have known more about his parents and his relationship to them and what happened to them in his adult reality. These things would have helped me care more about what happened to him and ultimately it would have helped me care more about his own mortality and whether or not he was indeed struggling with death or whether the entire story was just an illusion.

Overall, it was an engaging story and I would recommend it, but I feel it could have been much better if it were more developed and longer.

This is a lot fun. Those over 50 may enjoy this the most, but the premise is one that has some wide appeal. It is well written with pretty good dialog and interesting characters. It is a pretty quick read and one literary fans will likely enjoy. Recommended.

Thanks very much for the ARC for review!!

Quick read, charming story! If you were 65, would you want to go back to your teenage years and have a do-over? What about the life you left behind? Or the one you haven’t yet lived? This premise was written in a fresh new way. Has the boy/man gone back in time, or is he a teenager hallucinating the future? Seems like an easy choice, but there are many complications. Can you change the future as a youth? What if you already lived it and events turn out very differently from what you experienced? Would you miss your life as an aging adult? Would you trade your youth for the possibility of never seeing your wife, children, or grandchildren again? The possibilities are endless, and the angst is strong. This book makes you think, and it’s presented in a positive manner. If you are a curious sort, you will enjoy this book!
Thank you to Netgalley, the author and publishers for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

FIFTY IN REVERSE is a gem! The trope of reawakening as our teenaged selves is popular in film and some fiction, but Flanagan makes the idea fresh. When 65-year-old Peter wakes up as a 15-year-old, he is devastated. While he is delighted to see his parents, his misses his wife and grown children terribly. And he can't adjust to being 15; when a pretty girl tries to seduce him, Peter is horrified and pushes her away, stating "I'm married!" And worse than that, the 1970 he knows and remembers is not the same. The Beatles don't break up (wouldn't that have been amazing) but it makes Peter fear that his return has already altered his life to a degree that he will never meet his future wife or have his future children. FIFTY IN REVERSE is delightful riff on time, childhood and what we treasure most in family.

I wanted to read this book because I am the exact age of Peter, who is 65 years old in 2020 but who “wakes up” as his 15 year old self in 1970. So reading about all the 1970 references was hugely fun and brought back tons of memories. And made me sad and nostalgic because Peter also details the losses that pile up over 65 years. The novel has a new age kind of feel, particularly when discussing the back in time issue which I didn’t particularly go for, and I felt more could have been done with the premise( it is a short book though, which is not necessarily a bad thing in these bloated book times). In any event, I would Recommend this book.

This was entertaining. Very fast read, read all in one day! Was hoping for a little different ending though.

Oh nice, I’m the first to review this book. Good. I mean, I liked the book and have mostly good things to say about it. Didn't love it, it kind of didn't have that wow factor, but definitely liked it. So let’s have it…the author is apparently a famous radio and tv personality, who has been in entertainment business for ages. Which is to say one has every right to expect an entertaining story out of him and one does get one. Fifty in reverse is literally the direction the book’s protagonist’s life takes. One day a perfectly normal 15 year old boy wakes up claiming to be his 65 year old self who has seemingly travelled back in time and is now stuck being a kid again. Quite a pickle. To have foregone an entire life, a 30 year old marriage, three kids, a long career in radio, all to end up a hormonal teen in 1970. Needless to say, he isn’t thrilled. And the people around him are positively bewildered. The family hires a psychologist to try to figure out their suddenly very odd kid. The psychologist does his best, which subsequently results in some of the more profound discussions in the novel, when both of them are trying to figure out if this is a delusion, if it’s real, and what might be the ramifications of both. You’d think there’d be a lot of laughs on account of trying to fit it and juggle the two mentalities (65 and 15 year olds), but it’s relatively serious. Which is to say, every attempt was made at a serious imagining of what that sort of switch might result in, the psychology of it all. So the kid becomes more popular at school, first as a sort of class freak and later as a budding musician on account of knowing all the future hit songs (which are treated with hilarious dismissiveness by a music producer), but…seriously, that’s the third time I’m encountering that premise. Once in an indie science fiction novel, once in an appallingly cheaply sentimental Yesterday movie and now this. Enough already maybe? But then there’s the rest of the novel, where the kid has to fend off advance of a girl (for him, terribly underage at almost 15), have serious talks with his parents and so on, those are legitimately interesting, because the author utilizes as much plausibility as possible in a highly unusual scenario. Through its various characters, (the shrink, the mother, the kid himself) the novel does a lot of very credible contemplating and musing on the nature of time and our place in it. And in the end we are given to understand enough mechanics of behind the scenes to figure out how the reverse drive occurred, though it is ever so slightly a vague, abrupt and easy of a resolution. At any rate, it’s a very quick trip for a reader, gotta love a 200 page novel. And it does entertain plenty. There’s a heavy moral throughout about living in the now and enjoying your present without obsessing about the future. Pretty timely if you think about for a world where future has been, well, if not cancelled, then paused indefinitely. This book was a pretty enjoyable light diversion. A time traveling book without the actual time traveling, which is easier on the brain. Thanks Netgalley.

This book is very different from other time-travel books I've read. First of all, it is very well written with good characters and a nice pace to keep you interested throughout the book. There was never a point where I found myself disinterested in what I was reading, so that was good! I found the book emotional and more of a "what would you do" with thought-provoking moments instead of just a book that focuses only on the action/cool aspect of the time-traveling concept.

What made it lack a final star is at some points I was just left wanting a little bit more. I enjoyed the more character-building chapters and I thought they were key for this book's success, but I do think there were greater things to be achieved with such an intriguing plot.

I went through this surprisingly quickly, and ended up enjoying it!

In 2020, Peter Wyatt is 65 years old, happily married, with three grown children. Then he wakes up back in his 15-year-old body in 1970. Is he mad, in a coma, or back in time?

I raced through this book. Flanagan has an engaging style, and an ear for entertaining (if not always realistic) dialogue. Much of the opening is framed in conversations between Peter and his new therapist, Terry Canyon, who I expected to dislike -- he rides a motorcycle and studied under Timothy Leary! -- but who Flanagan succeeds in making oddly endearing. These early chapters, where Peter and Terry are trying to figure out the logic behind Peter's situation -- Peter practically and Terry, not believing but trying to help Peter -- are the best in the book. Through them, Flanagan lofts into the air a series of moral quandaries: should Peter fight to preserve the future he knows, in which he was <i>personally</i> happy, or try to change the world for the better? Can he and should he try to prevent major disasters? (He's blindsided early on by Kent State.) Should he proceed like a 65-year-old trapped in a 15-year-old's body, or like a 15-year-old who's had a glimpse 50 years into the future?

Unfortunately, having raised these fascinating, complicated questions, Flanagan kind of just leaves them hanging there. While never losing its fast pace or even parts of its poignancy, the book then turns down a, to me, far less interesting road, in which Peter -- who in the future married a musician and worked for a company like Spotify -- decides to finally take his stab at musical glory . . . by stealing songs written by famous artists of the decades to come. Even this diversion into the plot of the movie <i>Yesterday</i> doesn't really come to anything, or have any consequences, as Peter soon discovers that the 1970 he's come back to is <spoiler>an alternate universe where the Beatles never broke up and Nixon managed to win the Vietnam war (ew)</spoiler>. To me, this revelation robbed the book of much of its urgency and moral weight. I was still touched by some of the bridge building that occurs between Peter and his parents (and between Peter and his poor lonely guidance counselor -- <spoiler>WARN HIM ABOUT AIDS GODDAMMIT PETER</spoiler>), but for a book about lost chances, I feel like this novel misses out on a lot more complex but more interesting books it could have been. I still enjoyed it, but as a diversion, nothing more.