What if you lived your life, then had to do it all over again, only starting old and aging backwards? Well, this is what happened to Melly and Anny-Beth in Turnabout, an intriguing thriller by Margaret Peterson Haddix. Turnabout will make you rethink what you take for granted about living and dying. It is a great story about two women who explore the mysteries of science, time, and eternal youth.
Turnabout starts at a nursing home for very old people. Two doctors are experiment with a reverse-aging injection, and they need somewhere to test it. So they give the shot to fifty elderly people and watch what happens. Now it is the year 2085, and Melly and Anny-Beth are back in their teens.
This book shows that maybe Mother Nature is not to be messed with. The author (Margaret Peterson Haddix) splits the book into two intertwining stories: the year 2000 and the year 2085, both with the same characters. They age in reverse from one hundred to sixteen. As they go, they discover the downsides of the drug, and how much they do not know. Can they survive in their twisted, backward, world? Who will take care of them when they get too young? And what will happen when they hit age zero?
Haddix does a fine job posing these questions in an intriguing way, and she captured my attention. Overall, it was a great read. I liked how she switched back and forth in the periods of time, almost like flashbacks in movies. It gave the book good variety and mixed it up a little. You could tell that the author was very interested in the topic of aging, which made the book more interesting for the reader. I couldn't stop reading it. Out of ten stars, I would give it a nine.