The Boy I Loved Before - Softcover

Colgan, Jenny

3.49

3,079 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312331983 ISBN 13: 9780312331986

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2005

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

While attending her best friend Sashy's wedding, Flora Scurrison realizes that this monotonous, nine-to-five, cookie-cutter life is exactly what's in store for her. While it might be okay for Sashy, it's certainly not what she envisioned for herself when she was sixteen. So when her boyfriend proposes to her during the reception, Flora makes a wish to go back and do it all over again. The next morning she wakes up to find that she has been given the ultimate second chance--she's sixteen again. As Flora navigates school, first loves--new and old--and discovers what it really means to make adult choices, will she stay in her new body or try and find her way home?--in Jenny Colgan's The Boy I Loved Before.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

"The Boy I Loved Before is a triumph. It's witty and hilarious and so clever, with a compulsive story that kept me flicking the pages over madly, right to the end. I loved it." --Sophie Kinsella, author of Can You Keep a Secret and Confessions of a Shopaholic

From the Author:

How the book came about? Well, I was lying in the bath one afternoon about two years ago reading Heat magazine (hey, I consider it very important to the creative process) and I thought, this is nuts; I'm reading about Justin Timberlake, who I would have *loved* as a teenager, but I'm nearly thirty. When am I ever going to grow up? And that led me to thinking how much I've changed, and what it would be like to do it all again.

I saw some friends that night and said, 'What do you think it would be like going back to school but knowing everything you know now?' and it sparked so much conversation that I thought I must be on to a good thing.

I think at first you assume it will be great because now you know how to be cool and get served in pubs and you're better at dealing with the opposite sex (well, maybe not the last one), but then you remember how tribal school can be and all the bullying and hassle and chemistry you have to put up with and you think, hmmm, maybe not...

Originally the book was called Sixteen Again; Flora is thirty-two and unhappy with her life, and wakes up one day in her sixteen-year-old body.

I wanted to make Flora sixteen as opposed to thirteen or eleven (like in those Hollywood body-swap movies) for two reasons: firstly, because I needed to get her out the house on her own, and nobody lets thirteen-year-old girls out on their own these days, and secondly, because I wanted her to get a bit of fun and romance in her life without anyone calling the police.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.