I love “what if?” stories that explore how things might have gone if someone made a different decision at a turning point or if a twist of fate had gone another way. The movie Sliding Doors is one of my favorites, and I wrote something in that vein as a Christmas novella.

In that box of books set out on the sidewalk earlier this year, I found a review copy for a book that falls into that category, Begin Again by Helly Acton. Our heroine Frankie is turning 36 and unhappy with her life, feeling like she made some wrong decisions along the way. She’s still single, in a job that she’s come to hate, living in a tiny apartment, and having disastrous dates while her friends are married, buying property, having kids, and having dream jobs. On the night of her birthday, on the way home from another disaster date, she slips, falls, hits her head, and wakes up in a strange place that seems to be part train station, part office park.

There she’s informed that she died when she hit her head, but she’s being given a second chance. She can move on or go back, and she can choose which life she wants to go back to. She gets to live 24 hours in each of the lives she’d have now if she’d made a different decision at a pivotal moment in her past — if she’d taken that job abroad, if she’d accepted that marriage proposal, if she’d gone back to that ex, if she hadn’t chickened out on that job interview. Or she could go back to the life she had. It’s not an easy decision because each life has its pluses and minuses, and her old life has things she doesn’t want to give up even if she wasn’t happy with all of it.

I know the term is out of favor these days, but this book was pure chick lit, right out of 2002. We had our London singleton career girl, her job in the media, and her group of quirky friends. They tend to refer to books like this as “rom coms” now, but the romance content was pretty minimal. It was mostly about the heroine and her growth as a person. I really miss books like this, and I enjoyed this one, particularly with the twist of exploring a variety of possible lives. It would make a good movie since the lives are so different and Frankie’s just dumped into them without any kind of download for her to know what happened in the meantime since she made that pivotal choice. She doesn’t know how her relationships stand, where things are in the house where she lives, or what she does for a living, and she has to bluff her way through and figure things out on the fly. It would be a fun role for an actress. I guess it’s similar to the TV series Being Erica.

It’s funny, I generally find “light” reading like this more thought-provoking than literary fiction, maybe because it comes closer to relating to my life, so it makes me think. Woven in among the comedy hijinks is the idea of figuring out what you really want and what’s most important to you, as well as the idea that whatever life you end up in, you can’t change the past but you can change the future.

It looks like this one is a couple of years old (but this time I wasn’t the one sitting on a review copy until well after the book was published. I didn’t get it until a couple of years after it was published) and never heard about it, so I don’t know how it did. My smallish town library system has a couple of copies, which suggests it got some pickup, but it has no other books by this author.

I’ve been pondering what my pivotal decisions would be. Possibly admitting to myself that I actually hated my major in college and letting myself explore other options instead of forcing myself to stick with it. Then there was a job I hoped to get in another part of the country, gave up on and took another job (and got a new apartment), only to have the first job contact me about an opening. Maybe the decision to submit Enchanted, Inc. as chick lit rather than as fantasy (since it came out right as chick lit was dying off and urban fantasy was on the rise). I don’t really have any relationship ones since I never turned down a marriage proposal, I have no “man who got away,” and when I’ve run into men I used to have crushes on and see them now, I feel like I dodged a bullet.

Like I said, it’s a fun, fluffy book, but it really made me think.