If you could sit across from your seventeen year old self for five minutes, what would you say?
Would you offer a warning?
Would you tell that younger version of yourself to trust someone, avoid someone, take a chance, walk away, speak up, or hold on a little longer?
Most people can think of at least one moment when advice from an older self might have changed everything.
At seventeen, the future feels distant. Choices are made without knowing which ones will fade and which ones will remain for decades. A single experience can influence confidence, relationships, ambitions, and the way a person sees the world.
That possibility gives George T. Odell’s Reflections much of its emotional force.
Irene has spent years living with the consequences of what happened when she was young. Time has moved forward, but the past has never entirely released her. She remembers the life she once imagined and wonders who she might have become if events had unfolded differently.
Then an antique mirror gives her something impossible.
She is returned to the world of her youth.
Suddenly, seventeen is not a distant memory. It is real again.
Irene can see familiar places, people she thought were gone forever, and a version of herself that still has choices ahead of her. She knows what pain is coming because she has already lived through it. She also knows what decades of regret can do to a person.
So what should she change?
That question is more complicated than simply avoiding one terrible moment.
An older person carries knowledge that a teenager does not. Irene understands consequences, loss, opportunity, and how quickly life can move in directions no one expects. She can imagine choosing education, love, family, and a future that once seemed beyond her reach.
But changing the past also means changing everything that came from it.
People she later loved may never enter her life. Relationships that gave her comfort may disappear before they ever begin. A better future for one version of Irene could mean losing something precious to another.
That is why the idea of speaking to your younger self can be both comforting and unsettling.
We imagine giving advice because we know what hurt us. Yet we rarely consider what else might disappear if that pain were removed.
Reflections takes that familiar question and gives it consequences.
For readers who enjoy supernatural fiction about memory, second chances, lost youth, family, and difficult choices, Irene’s journey asks something deeply personal.
If you could tell your seventeen year old self exactly what was coming, would you?
And if that younger version listened, would you still become the person you are today?
Read the book on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0bNKQg0K