Turnabout by Margaret Peterson Haddix Review

 

This book makes you wonder if immortality is a good idea.

It was pretty hard to get ahold of this book, because it's one of the author's older books from the year 2000. I found this copy of it at a library in my area that I don't go to frequently, and they have a lot of older books. 

Turnabout by Margaret Peterson Haddix starts out in the year 2000, with a group of centenarians in a nursing home. This group signed on to a be a part of a secret (and illegal) science experiment that will age them backwards. Well, they only age backwards physically. 

The story mostly follows two of the participants: Melly and Anny Beth, as they try to survive away from the public eye in the year 2085 as teenagers again. Now that the girls are closer to being babies again, they need to find someone to take care of them. It is not easy trying to lay low when they live in a world where you practically have no privacy. There is also a tabloid reporter that seems to be trying to track them down, and she appears to be a distant relative of Melly's. The girls wonder if their secret has been exposed.

That's what the story is explained in the simplest way possible. You probably have a lot of questions, like "Do their families know about all this?" No, in order to keep it a secret, the participants are forbidden from seeing their families. The doctor's in charge of the experiment actually fake everyone's deaths. Also "why did these doctors even do this experiment in the first places? Isn't this wrong?" Why they conducted the experiment gets explained in the first few chapters, and questioning the ethics of it all gets sprinkled throughout the book, with no definitive answer. "Who will take care of the participants after the original doctors dies?" Their descendants, whom you meet towards the end, and they are not the kind of people who'd you expect them to be. 

Yeah, there is a lot going on in this 200 page book! It was a gripping page turner, like all of Ms. Haddix's books. I really love how philosophical the story gets. 

But I am giving it 4 stars, but that was mostly just because of pacing issues. I also thought the ending was a little abrupt. Some things were resolved too easily, and some things were still not resolved. But I guess the story was just trying to replicate real life.