A NEW CHANCE

A man dies and becomes reborn as a troubled teenage girl in this literary novel.

In an attempt to avoid arrest for possession, 18-year-old Naomi Donnelly swallowed an entire bag of drugs. Now she’s been in a coma for months with no sign of improvement. Army veteran Mark Kelleher is rushing to a Tinder date when he’s involved in a terrible accident on the highway. Before he can escape the wrecked vehicle, he is engulfed in the resulting flames. He wakes up in a hospital bed screaming about a fire—but he’s no longer in his own body. Instead, he has somehow inhabited the body of Naomi Donnelly: “It was Naomi’s slim hands that lifted up to feel her face and grab a strand of hair to inspect. Yes, long blonde hair, kind of dirty and oily, it seems to have some gooey stuff in it. What has happened to me? Am I still Mark? Or, have I become someone else? Am I crazy?” He decides that, because Mark died in the fire, he must live as Naomi. The new Naomi discusses the issue with her psychotherapist, Dr. Partridge, who believes her story and helps her get released from the mental health facility in which she’s being kept. Partridge also finds her a place to live in the home of the Morrisons, a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints couple who recently lost their daughter in a drunken driving accident. Naomi decides to enroll in a local college and become a nurse. While working as a nursing intern, she meets Jesse Manzanares, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and a SWAT member who was shot in the line of duty. The two fall for each other, but their relationship is strained when Naomi decides to enlist as a nurse in the Army Reserve. Like Mark and Jesse before her, Naomi is called to serve in Afghanistan. Throughout her experiences, Naomi runs into strange coincidences that have to do with Mark—but what will she do with this second chance at life?

Ready’s prose is lucid and straightforward, as here where he describes Naomi’s new outfit: “Part of her first paycheck from Kentfield Farms had gone downtown to the big western wear emporium. The jeans were standard skinny-leg, boot-cut women’s jeans, but they had plenty of decorative shiny rivets and rhinestones down the leg seams and on the pockets.” While the premise may sound familiar, this novel is no body-switching comedy. In fact, Mark largely disappears from the story after the first act, subsumed into the much more powerful (if memoryless) Naomi. Nor does the book deal with the issue of switched gender. Rather, the tale—which seems long at over 350 pages—is primarily about Naomi’s development from patient to nursing student to Army nurse. The plot moves slowly, and the characters, for all the time readers spend with them, are disappointingly flat except for Naomi. What’s more, the narrative’s themes—life cycles, growth, learning from mistakes—are somewhat vague and confused. It ends up being a rather sentimental story, though not one that will stir many deep feelings in readers.

An oddly quotidian tale built around a fantastic premise.