Oona Out of Order

Published in 2020, Margarita Montimore’s Oona Out of Order is on the surface a novel of time travel through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but at its heart it is a bildungsroman of psychological and moral growth. Oona Out of Order has appeared on many “best of” lists, including the Good Morning America Book Club Picks, the March 2020 Indie Next Picks, and the GoodReads Staffers’ Top Three Books of the Year. As of 2023, it was being developed into a series by Amazon Studios.

The novel appeared in the UK as The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart. The edition used for this analysis is the 2021 Flatiron Books Paperback Edition.

Content Warning: This novel contains explicit descriptions of drug use and discussion of addiction; it also depicts nonconsensual sex (specifically, sex engaged in under false pretenses) and brief anti-gay/anti-trans sentiment.

Plot Summary

An older version of Oona Lockhart stands looking in the mirror, musing that her exterior age doesn’t fit her interior and that each time period contains both good and bad. This day is a bad one, and she wears a funeral dress. She doesn’t know where in time she will be next year and notes that her best approach is to try to live as best she can in the moment. Nevertheless, she wishes she could be back at the party with her first love where she first experienced time travel.

The narrative skips backward to New York City on New Year’s Eve 1982. Oona is about to turn 19. She is at her birthday party with her boyfriend, Dale, with whom she is in deep, passionate love. However, she is agonizing over whether to continue her education abroad or to tour with her band. She is currently the keyboardist and would rather play the guitar, but her boyfriend has claimed that instrument.

At the stroke of midnight, she faints and wakes up in 2015 at age 51. She finds herself in a beautiful brownstone house with a kind, handsome young man who says he is Kenzie, her personal assistant and friend. Oona has trouble believing what is happening, but Kenzie gives Oona a white envelope with the rules of her life as a rich time traveler; these instructions were written by the 2014 version of herself. As Oona tries to reconcile herself to her situation, her mother, Madeleine, also helps. She takes Oona on a polar swim, attempting to get her daughter out of her head, but it overwhelms Oona, who has learned that Dale died at 20 of a stroke. Oona spends days in bed until Kenzie wakes her with Kate Bush’s music. Oona spends most of the year catching up on what has happened, particularly in music, and getting to know Kenzie, whom she comes to think of as a good friend. On New Year’s Eve, she hopes she will wake up younger.

She does, regaining consciousness in the middle of a packed dance floor in 1991. She is on ecstasy, and the combination of the drug and her elation at being 27 and pretty results in her having sex with a handsome stranger. Only afterward does she learn that she has a boyfriend, Crosby. When he treats her to a fancy birthday dinner the next day, Oona admits what happened and he breaks up with her. Oona spends the remainder of the year partying with a group of transgender and drag queen friends whose company she enjoys but who encourage her increasing drug use. In her frustration about her situation, she sees this as living in the moment and ignores Madeleine’s warnings about addiction running in the family. Oona’s negative behavior culminates in her jeopardizing herself and her friends when she recklessly picks a fight. This convinces Oona she needs to change, and her friend Cyn encourages her to leave her current life, parting with her as friends on New Year’s Eve.

Oona wakes up on the subway in 2004, age 40, with a young woman trying to give her a pen. The woman says Oona was speaking about an Edward and a Peter. Oona goes home to find a strange man waiting outside for her. He tells her he is her husband, Edward Clary, that he is a chef, and that they are opening a restaurant together. Oona has told him that she loses her memory every year, and he gives her a white envelope from her 2003 self that confirms Edward’s story and encourages her to try to make it work with Edward.

Oona finds that opening the restaurant is expensive and that she isn’t included in many of the decisions. Nevertheless, Oona finds Edward sexy and charming and appreciates their strong physical chemistry. Madeleine, however, doesn’t seem to like Edward. During a strained discussion with Oona in which Madeleine mentions that Dale didn’t allow Oona’s true passion to thrive, Oona decides to begin guitar lessons. She immediately connects with her instructor, Peter Han, over their shared love of music, and Oona feels guilty as her feelings for him grow while her marriage to Edward falters. Meanwhile, Oona receives post cards from Kenzie with cryptic phrases about needing time to process his anger.

The restaurant fails, and on the night Oona gives her first public guitar performance, she tells Edward she wants a divorce. When she builds up the courage to ask Peter on a date, he says the timing is bad. Oona ends the year heartbroken over her failed marriage and the loss of Peter, hoping she’ll go back in time instead of forward.

She does, but only to 2003. She tries to avoid meeting Edward by going to Egypt, only to have him seated next to her on the plane. They bond over music and movies, and she finds herself falling in love with him during a whirlwind, passionate trip through Egypt. A few weeks after they return to New York, Oona decides to support his dream of opening a restaurant in hopes that things might turn out differently. She reasons that she has already handled the pain of the breakup and so should enjoy the happiness. They go on a small vacation and return to find the brownstone robbed. Oona’s most precious possession, a watch from Dale, is gone, along with two of her prized guitars.

Oona’s relationship with Madeleine becomes badly strained, and when Oona reveals that Madeleine’s current relationship will fail, she hurts Madeleine deeply. To heal the relationship, Oona asks Madeleine to a Susanne Vega concert, but Madeleine gives her ticket to a young Kenzie, who says he doesn’t know Madeleine or Oona. He is obviously unhappy and admits he is grieving his mothers’ deaths. Oona wants to comfort him and offers him an assistant’s job when he comes back from a planned trip to Asia. He says he will write and then leaves.

On New Year’s Eve, Oona discovers photographic evidence that Edward is cheating on her with his consultant, Francesca. She also finds Dale’s watch and realizes he stole it. When she confronts him, he admits he robbed her to pay gambling debts. Angry and horrified, Oona tries to write herself a warning note to replace the one she previously wrote and left with Edward. However, she loses her pen and paper and leaps before she has the chance to write the warning.

She wakes up on vacation with her mother in Vietnam in 1995. Oona spends the year learning to live in the moment and enjoy life. She bonds with her mother and heals from Edward’s betrayal. She faces her fears about drowning and plays her guitar for anyone who asks, and by the end of the year, she thinks she is ready for anything. However, the first revelation she receives upon waking in her brownstone in 1999 is that the initials on her wrist stand for “McKenzie Dale Charles Ray”: Kenzie is her son. Her prior self made the hard decision to give him to Madeleine’s friend for adoption since her leaps prevent her from adequately raising a child.

Oona is furious with her mother for keeping the secret that past Oona asked Madeleine to keep. She insists on seeing her son. Madeleine cautions her that there are legal repercussions and emotional consequences for her actions, but Oona doesn’t listen. She goes to Boston, creates an alternate persona who works in the coffeehouse that Kenzie frequents, and begins to get to know her son. They bond over music, and when Oona volunteers to take him to a concert, Kenzie’s mothers ask her to dinner to make sure she is a safe person to entrust with their son. However, one of his mothers recognizes her as Kenzie’s mother. Learning this, Kenzie becomes angry with both his mothers and Oona.

Devastated, Oona returns to New York, where Madeleine is waiting to comfort her. Oona is appalled by what she’s done to her son and declares that she never wants to hurt anyone like that again. As she leaps, she hopes she will see Kenzie again.

She wakes up in 2017 with Kenzie welcoming her to the New Year. She is relieved to see him but almost immediately learns Madeleine is dying of cancer. Now that everything is out in the open, Oona and Kenzie bond, and Oona does her best to apologize and start being a good mother. They spend as much quality time with Madeline as they can, and she and Oona get to say what they mean to each other before Madeleine dies.

Having embraced living in the moment and thinking of others, Oona encourages Kenzie to travel to meet a man he met online. Oona then picks the guitar up again and spends time volunteering. On the day before Kenzie returns, she sees Peter Han playing the guitar for children in a library. They reunite over coffee and immediately feel the old connection. They schedule a date for the near future so Oona has something to look forward to.

Oona leaps and wakes up at the 1983 party that began her journey. She kisses Dale, focused solely on the present moment. She finds she can make decisions easily and stands up for herself when the band gets together to play, insisting that she wants to play the guitar. She takes Dale aside and asks that they spend more time together on tour, setting them up for a year of adventure and love. She kisses him, confident and excited to enjoy her best life.