Hello friends! Happy Monday, I hope you’re all well! Today I’m posting my review of Amy Lea’s novel, Woke Up Like This.

This book was longlisted for Canada Reads 2024.

Woke Up Like This by: Amy Lea: Charlotte is so goal oriented and focused on the next thing, she’s never in the present. When one of her goals, planning the perfect prom, starts to go sideways because of her archrival, Renner, she does everything in her power to get it back on track… only she didn’t plan on crash landing 30 years into the future. After falling off a ladder while decorating, Charlotte finds herself in her 30-year-old body, engaged to last person she’d ever expect, Renner. Frantic to get back to the past, she slowly realizes the future has a lot to teach her. This was such a cute and cozy read that the reader had such a hard time putting down. The plot was fun and the characters made it interesting. The whole 13 Going on 30 plot was fun and the fact that it wasn’t just our main character who went into the future, but her arch nemesis did too, made for an even juicer read. At first the reader felt they were comparing this to the movie too much, but as the story went on, it got easier to separate and enjoy this as its own work of fiction. The characters were really good too, although what stopped this from being a full out five star read was the fact that the main character was a bit of a control freak. It really made the reader wonder how she had any of the friends she did because she could be so bossy. It also didn’t really add up that her enemy secretly found it endearing because it wasn’t. But aside from that, she really did learn a lot, not just about herself, but about the people in her life, when she finally gave them the time of day to explain themselves. A lot of the conflicts could have been resolved very quickly if they had communicated to one another better, but then this book wouldn’t exist otherwise. What the reader liked about the miscommunication though, was that it forced these characters to have open and honest conversations and confront problems head on instead of letting it sit. There were some blow outs in this due to those harboured feelings, but it made the story feel more authentic to real life that way. Each of the characters felt layered in their development; we met them at their surface level, but as the story progressed we really got to see a deeper side to them, which Lea did a great job of in such a short amount of time. In the end, despite some of the qualms this reader had with the characters, this was still a really fast-paced, short, cute and enjoyable read.