BOOK REVIEW: Growing Up Again by Catriona McCloud

One night Janie Lawson decides to leave her husband, Ludo. The next morning she wakes up back in 1981 aged 15. So far, so Jenny Colgan’s Do You Remember the First Time, but Catriona McCloud’s Growing Up Again is a very different, and much better, book.

Janie can’t work out why she’s gone back in time, but she thinks it might be to avert some future disasters, so she sets about trying to make some changes, starting with stopping Lady Diana Spencer from marrying Prince Charles. But Janie doesn’t limit herself to national and international events, she wants to change things for her parents too, to give them a better future.

Where the Jenny Colgan book was more about Flora adjusting to life as a teenager again and trying to work out whether to accept a proposal (back in the real world), Growing Up Again has a much bigger theme. Family, responsibility, addiction, even mental health. But that doesn’t mean it’s a serious book. I found it almost unputdownable and it made me laugh and cry.

Janie isn’t, on the surface, a sympathetic character. She can’t truly explain why she wants to leave her apparently sweet husband and she’s bossy and dogmatic, but I loved her and was rooting for her throughout. Her parents are lovely characters, her friend Danny is hilarious and charming (while not being a traditional hero) and McCloud writes beautifully. This sentence, simple as it is, made me gasp in recognition:

The kitchen was the same as ever, neat but dirty, and when he opened the fridge to get milk for our tea I could see dried spills on the shelves and a layer of onion skins and tomato stalks in the bottom drawer, but not much in the way of food beyond a tub of Stork and half a cabbage face down on a dinner plate.

I mean the Stork and half-cabbage reminded me of my old family fridge, not that my fridge is so grotty. Ahem.

My only complaint about this book is the ending. Towards the end I couldn’t read fast enough and found myself marvelling at how McCloud had managed to make something so far-fetched so believable and thrilling, but then, as I approached the final page I got a creeping sense that I wasn’t going to like what I found. And I was right. In fact, I shouted, “Noooo!” Then again, that may be personal preference; some readers may think it was the only possible way it could end. Anyway, it meant that I’m giving it a 4 instead of a 5, but I can’t wait to see what Catriona McCloud comes up with next. Brilliant.

Rating: 4 out of 5

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