Michael Thompson (21)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Family GP Charlie Knight fears life is passing him by. He’s in his late thirties, and treading water as a family doctor in the same small town he grew up in.

Just as he’s planning his escape, something changes. He develops a gift, an extraordinary insight for any doctor: a sense of exactly how many days his patients have left to live.

But in a country town like Marwick, his patients are his friends. His own family. The people he grew up with, and the show more girl he still loves.

And Charlie discovers this gift may not be a gift at all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: NOT A ROM-COM. Do not look at the cover illustration and think it's going to be a sweet little romp as the MC gets a second chance at Luuuv. (That is part of what happens, but honestly not as much as the visuals suggest.) Oh, and to be honest, calling a thirtyish woman "the girl he still loves" is not a great choice, copywriting department.

What kept me reading this story was Charlie's mildly perplexed attitude towards his newfound ability to "see" how long a person has left to live. What a Burnsian gift:

Oh, would some Power the gift give us
To see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us,
And foolish notion:
What airs in dress and gait would leave us,
And even devotion!...from To a Louse

...for a doctor to discover! It could at first glance seem like a gift...but quite soon it would naturally become a burden.

Bearing that burden is a man we don't really get to know, but more know about. We have no access to his...or anyone else's...thoughts, we're in a third-person close narrative style so we are more or less the camera in the movie of Charlie's life. I went back and forth on this choice, does it work does it help me "get" the story...it does and it doesn't. It's a choice that makes the story outside us, and them; it's a story that is about a place we do not feel we belong to while really caring about the guy showing us around.

No one else gets much attention, really. Ideas are introduced but not explored any more than the not-Charlie characters are. I'm not all the way in sympathy with that choice because of the nature of Charlie's "gift." A bit more about the people whose lives he senses pretty clearly the ends of might've increased my investment in them and the story.

I did get invested, however, as I resonate with Charlie's newfound ability to see what is not obvious. I quite liked his slightly befuddled response to it. I liked Charlie, and I was glad to sped time with him. As it is told, it felt to me like something from the midcentury of US or UK middlebrow fiction.

That is an honest compliment, as those kinds of stories are able to convey the essential goodness in most people. Everyone in this story, no matter how incomplete their characters felt to me, was an essentially well-meaning person (if sometimes slightly lost).

It's a welcome, and welcoming, place to be. show less

Cleverly written, this is a story of Charlie Knight, a 34-year-old physician who was treating an elderly lady for arthritis. Suddenly he felt pressure inside his head and stumbled over. He was able to get up and the she agreed to keep this episode a secret.

That’s when he noticed that everything changed when his brain was jostled. Charlie was now seeing numbers and could predict how many days would be left of his patient's lives.

Is it possible to see the future? This isn’t the first book show more that has focused on a character with the extraordinary ability to forecast the last day of living. Yet, it’s the first story of a doctor with the count-down of a patient’s days, months, or years that are left in their life. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know this information that was now coming to him.

At first, I thought what a great gift it would be as now he could better treat people with ailments. However, there were complications.

The beginning of the story took some time trying to sort out the main characters. But a few chapters in and I was hooked. It was one of those thought-provoking concepts of “what if” this was possible. There was family drama with his parents, unexpected twists and the possibility of a romance. The ending put a smile on my face.

My thanks to Sourcebooks Landmark and NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this book with an expected release date of May 21, 2025. show less

This is a nicely written book that does a reverse of the more common retrograde amnesia stories (every day I forget the past) we see. (e.g. Gene Wolfe's Soldier Series). Tommy is forgotten every year by the people around him. Great idea. Alas I found it slow.

This is a time loop story, and most of them are incredibly repetitive. This one was, even though the author had interesting transitions in one sentence or less. It was...so much of the same thing, in this book. I didn't feel challenged or worried as a reader, and wondered if I was missing something.