Mayday by Jonathan Friesen (review)

Charged by her now long-gone father with looking after her little sister, Addy, Crow has been consumed with doing just that. She gave up sleep to protect Addy from her pedophilic stepfather, and her final act was to protect Addy from a boy planning to violate her at prom; as she was driving him away from Addy, they were hit by a train. Now seventeen-year-old Crow is in a coma and finds herself with a second chance: she can take a loaner body and return to any point in her life, but she is told that her mission is not to attend to Addy’s needs as much as her own, as her total focus on threats to Addy has rendered her soul a twisted and deformed thing that needs to heal before she moves on. Stubborn as ever, though, she accepts the deal, thinking she can undo the mistakes she made and change history. While the premise is promising, the plotting is leggy and disjointed: Crow fails in her first return as a thirteen-year-old girl named Shane and is allowed yet another chance as a seventeen-year-old boy, also named Shane, and the other characters all too readily accept the sudden appearance, disappearance, and shape-shifting of these newcomer Shanes who are weirdly knowledgeable about everyone’s lives. Addy herself is unconvincingly naïve and untroubled, especially after she is assaulted by her stepfather. Crow, however, has a believably cynical disposition that is most evident in the harsh, angry tenor of her narration of past events. As she sees herself through the eyes of the Shanes, she confronts her damage with a gentleness she had previously reserved only for others; readers who are overly critical of themselves may find here a model for widening perspective.