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The Rewind Effect
There are two types of those who want to forget and those who would do anything to remember.
Jamie Kessler wants to remember. After a car accident wipes away most of her memories, she's left with fragments of a life she no longer recognizes. Confused and overwhelmed, Jamie undergoes an experimental procedure to recapture lost memories. With each recollection, she pieces together a feeling that something—or someone—is clinging to her heart and won't let go. One name keeps coming up and is impossible to forget, Mallory Ziegler. The woman she met in an AOL chatroom when she was nineteen, the woman she fell madly in love with, and the woman she somehow lost.
The more she digs, the deeper she falls for Mallory and embraces the love that memory never erased. But some memories were buried for a reason, and the pain and betrayal she discovers could completely change the direction of her life.
Jamie Kessler wants to remember. After a car accident wipes away most of her memories, she's left with fragments of a life she no longer recognizes. Confused and overwhelmed, Jamie undergoes an experimental procedure to recapture lost memories. With each recollection, she pieces together a feeling that something—or someone—is clinging to her heart and won't let go. One name keeps coming up and is impossible to forget, Mallory Ziegler. The woman she met in an AOL chatroom when she was nineteen, the woman she fell madly in love with, and the woman she somehow lost.
The more she digs, the deeper she falls for Mallory and embraces the love that memory never erased. But some memories were buried for a reason, and the pain and betrayal she discovers could completely change the direction of her life.
1 pages, Audio CD
Published August 11, 2026
About the author
Morgan Lee Miller
10 books183 followersMorgan Lee Miller started writing at the age of 5 in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. Since there is absolutely nothing to do there, she entertained herself by writing her first few novels by hand.
She currently resides in Washington, D.C. with her two feline children, Milo and Elsa. She has a serious problem with oversharing pictures of her cats on Instagram and promises never to apologize for it.
She currently resides in Washington, D.C. with her two feline children, Milo and Elsa. She has a serious problem with oversharing pictures of her cats on Instagram and promises never to apologize for it.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 86 reviews
August 31, 2026
READ THIS
Ok so I just loved this book, a lot. I don’t know if its one of the best books I have read this year, or if it was just the right thing at the right time for me in particular, but I LOVED it. This was a page turner that I couldn’t put down and NEEDED to know what was going to happen next. It’s a simple book ultimately, but maybe that’s what makes it so effective.
The structure of the novel was creative and original, and I like the way the author used it to carry us through the story; new favorite dual-timeline book? idk that’s a tough contest but its up there.
I loved the flashbacks. I don’t think I have read anything that captured the 90’s and early 2000’s as well as this book did and I enjoyed the nostalgia. I loved the BIG emotions and they definitely got me. This was just satisfying, plainly and simply. All the stars.
This novel had messy characters. Actual messy, realistic, real characters though, not the “we have messy characters” that people sometimes say when they want to write something toxic or that doesn’t make sense. Real life hurts sometimes, and I think it’s the very realistic nature of this story that allowed it to leave an impact on me.
After reading this I was wondering when the last time I read something I liked this much was….so I looked (yay GoodReads)! And I think the last book I read that I liked this much was about 60-70 books ago; I think that speaks for itself.
This wasn’t perfect, I'm not promising that. There are a few parts where I wish the story had slowed down and spent a little more time, and the ending was one of them. There are a handful of little things I would change if I could. The overall package though, was just a chefs kiss.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing a free ARC. This honest review was left voluntarily.
Ok so I just loved this book, a lot. I don’t know if its one of the best books I have read this year, or if it was just the right thing at the right time for me in particular, but I LOVED it. This was a page turner that I couldn’t put down and NEEDED to know what was going to happen next. It’s a simple book ultimately, but maybe that’s what makes it so effective.
The structure of the novel was creative and original, and I like the way the author used it to carry us through the story; new favorite dual-timeline book? idk that’s a tough contest but its up there.
I loved the flashbacks. I don’t think I have read anything that captured the 90’s and early 2000’s as well as this book did and I enjoyed the nostalgia. I loved the BIG emotions and they definitely got me. This was just satisfying, plainly and simply. All the stars.
This novel had messy characters. Actual messy, realistic, real characters though, not the “we have messy characters” that people sometimes say when they want to write something toxic or that doesn’t make sense. Real life hurts sometimes, and I think it’s the very realistic nature of this story that allowed it to leave an impact on me.
After reading this I was wondering when the last time I read something I liked this much was….so I looked (yay GoodReads)! And I think the last book I read that I liked this much was about 60-70 books ago; I think that speaks for itself.
This wasn’t perfect, I'm not promising that. There are a few parts where I wish the story had slowed down and spent a little more time, and the ending was one of them. There are a handful of little things I would change if I could. The overall package though, was just a chefs kiss.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing a free ARC. This honest review was left voluntarily.
August 29, 2026
Her stare carries sympathy, and that gravitational pull of hers catches my spiraling thoughts and anchors me to the now. I let myself get lost in her eyes until my pulse slows. As I relax, she nods subtly, like I’m doing something right by looking at her and only her, like nothing else exists. (pg. 228).
I cannot separate my own lived experience from this story. There are simply too many emotions. No, I did not have TBI. No, I did not have amnesia. But, “you’re an ache that never healed,” (pg. 152) something along those lines. I must be going on 18 years now; a similar time span in which Jamie and Mallory find each other, while attending college at opposite sides of the country, through AOL chat – yes, 90’s nostalgia is front and center. A love story erased by a car accident that goes back 20 years. Jamie undergoes an experiment to reclaim her memories. The esteemed Dr. Wilson leads the treatment. Beautiful, quiet, sharp around the edges, with controlled emotions. Blink and you’ll miss her nonverbal thoughts. Jamie seems to catch them. Miller takes you through a creative balance between past and present where both main characters develop an array of relationships [with each other and beyond] through their late teens, young adult life and well into adulthood.
Imagine reliving your memories for the first time. Every kiss, every touch, every emotion. There is so much wrapped up in the chemistry, between these two it’s intoxicating. But the heartbreak will tangle you up. You are pulled and your chest will ache. From Jamie’s point of view, it is clear – Mallory is her person. But then, mistakes are made. They aren’t flushed out and as the reader this may frustrate you. Time is also lost and Jamie takes you into her grief because “moving on” seems impossible. Will lessons be learned? What happens when a second chance, scratch that, a third chance is presented in the most peculiar way. “Answers rise from what has been, but hope blooms in what could be” (pg. 190) Jamie, what will you do with hope?
God, I want Mallory’s POV.
I cannot separate my own lived experience from this story. There are simply too many emotions. No, I did not have TBI. No, I did not have amnesia. But, “you’re an ache that never healed,” (pg. 152) something along those lines. I must be going on 18 years now; a similar time span in which Jamie and Mallory find each other, while attending college at opposite sides of the country, through AOL chat – yes, 90’s nostalgia is front and center. A love story erased by a car accident that goes back 20 years. Jamie undergoes an experiment to reclaim her memories. The esteemed Dr. Wilson leads the treatment. Beautiful, quiet, sharp around the edges, with controlled emotions. Blink and you’ll miss her nonverbal thoughts. Jamie seems to catch them. Miller takes you through a creative balance between past and present where both main characters develop an array of relationships [with each other and beyond] through their late teens, young adult life and well into adulthood.
Imagine reliving your memories for the first time. Every kiss, every touch, every emotion. There is so much wrapped up in the chemistry, between these two it’s intoxicating. But the heartbreak will tangle you up. You are pulled and your chest will ache. From Jamie’s point of view, it is clear – Mallory is her person. But then, mistakes are made. They aren’t flushed out and as the reader this may frustrate you. Time is also lost and Jamie takes you into her grief because “moving on” seems impossible. Will lessons be learned? What happens when a second chance, scratch that, a third chance is presented in the most peculiar way. “Answers rise from what has been, but hope blooms in what could be” (pg. 190) Jamie, what will you do with hope?
God, I want Mallory’s POV.
August 28, 2026
Every emotion I own has been thoroughly played with, hammered, plucked and petted like my favorite song. I hit play on this audiobook and Morgan Lee Miller and Quinn Riley whispers in my ears a fantastic story of memory and a love that never truly ends. I love the concept of using music to help regain memories lost in a traumatic car accident. Dipping back and forth in time with Jamie and Mallory is a rollercoaster ride that thrills and breaks your heart. I highly recommend this wonderful book and if possible get the audiobook. Of course I'm giving this 5 Radiohead stars
August 16, 2026
I absolutely love this book! It brought me back to AOL and the music of the times!
Jamie needs this procedure to get her memories back after a devestating accident.
This book is heart warming and heart wrenching. It is a beautiful book!
A FAVORITE!!! Worth more than 5 stars!
Jamie needs this procedure to get her memories back after a devestating accident.
This book is heart warming and heart wrenching. It is a beautiful book!
A FAVORITE!!! Worth more than 5 stars!
August 3, 2026
I enjoyed this book, it was a different style, with flashbacks used as a diagnostic medical method to restore Jamies's memory. It was also very much a YA story since the majority of the book is told through the flashbacks going back 25 years when Jamie and Mallory met on an AOL chat room.
Jamie's insecurity was a big problem in her relationships, she could never fully trust any of her partners. Mallory was also a bit troubled because, she didn't like the long distance relationship that she had with Jamie and settled for other women to fill her romantic needs.
Thanks to Net Galley for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.
Jamie's insecurity was a big problem in her relationships, she could never fully trust any of her partners. Mallory was also a bit troubled because, she didn't like the long distance relationship that she had with Jamie and settled for other women to fill her romantic needs.
Thanks to Net Galley for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 12, 2026
Wow! What a ride and interesting concept! Thank you to NetGalley, the author and publisher for an advance review copy for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily.
I loved the premise and the execution was well done. I felt the story was well paced and filled with emotion, first love, heartbreak, second chances and cool medical breakthroughs (fictional of course). But what I really enjoyed was the nostalgia I felt in just about every chapter. From the dawn of the internet and AOL cartoons to twenty-five years of living, learning, making mistakes and reaching maturity where change is viable.
Read Jamie’s story. Live through the rewind and be immersed in the nostalgia as well as the connections and experiences that shaped not only Jamie and Mallory, but many of us as well.
Recommend!
I loved the premise and the execution was well done. I felt the story was well paced and filled with emotion, first love, heartbreak, second chances and cool medical breakthroughs (fictional of course). But what I really enjoyed was the nostalgia I felt in just about every chapter. From the dawn of the internet and AOL cartoons to twenty-five years of living, learning, making mistakes and reaching maturity where change is viable.
Read Jamie’s story. Live through the rewind and be immersed in the nostalgia as well as the connections and experiences that shaped not only Jamie and Mallory, but many of us as well.
Recommend!
August 31, 2026
This has been an interesting story featuring a woman with amnesia following an accident—a seemingly recurring theme in recent lesbian novels. What makes this one innovative is the method by which the protagonist regains her lost memories; since it forces her to relive them, the story becomes one about her adolescence rather than her adulthood, as she relives her entire youth over the course of a single week.
Beyond the amnesia, the story focuses on Jamie, beginning with an online relationship she started in the late 90s—the era when chat rooms for meeting people first emerged. She was 19 when she met Mallory, a girl living on the other side of the country; what began as an online connection eventually evolved into an in-person relationship. In her quest to regain her memory, Jamie relives every moment of that relationship, alongside the early days of her professional career.
The story is original, though it has shades of *Forrest Gump*—I’m exaggerating a bit. But there are historical moments that give you goosebumps when you relive them.
Beyond the amnesia, the story focuses on Jamie, beginning with an online relationship she started in the late 90s—the era when chat rooms for meeting people first emerged. She was 19 when she met Mallory, a girl living on the other side of the country; what began as an online connection eventually evolved into an in-person relationship. In her quest to regain her memory, Jamie relives every moment of that relationship, alongside the early days of her professional career.
The story is original, though it has shades of *Forrest Gump*—I’m exaggerating a bit. But there are historical moments that give you goosebumps when you relive them.
August 4, 2026
Romance isn’t my favorite genre but I’ve been working on reading more and finding a lot of great queer romance books that I have really enjoyed and I thought the idea of music and memory to be really intriguing.
However i just can’t escape the struggle I feel when toxic relationships are glorified because of “love”.
The story follows Jamie in her mid forties trying to remember her past through a breakout technology that uses light patterns and music. Starting in the early AOL days of chat rooms and mix tapes we see a relationship traverse the decades with Mallory.
The relationship parts in the beginning I really liked. The nostalgia mixed with the queer identity of the 90s and time in early adulthood just really solid. It was after 2001 where I think the story falters significantly and it just becomes such a toxic mess.
I didn’t mind all the ups and downs of their relationship and the stages they go through and a lot of it does make sense but it does bother me when there was no growth, no effort them to work on being better and the sex scenes felt displaced as a result. It feels so much like infatuation and lust and I don’t think it was intended to and the disjointed moments really stand out.
Other huge problems I have (while keeping spoiler free).
- how the hell does a huge music lover working in the music industry in NYC during 2001 not mention The Blueprint by Jay-Z. Sure the MC loves grunge but she likes shitty pop music by all the references she makes to them (I mean a 23 year old being more excited for N*sync instead of Jay-z???). The Blueprint will forever be tied to NYC because of the songs but the day it came out and how it propelled people into moments of pride and love for a damaged city. To ignore this album - arguably one of Jay-z’s best albums and overall greatest rap albums of all time - is such a shame.
- the music choices are all radio hits and singles. That was really disappointing too. Liking the song Meet Virginia is also a -⭐️ the self proclaimed music snob being in love with American idol or whatever show it was and talking pop music is just another show of hypocrisy. Jamie has a mini rant about thinking Nirvana is overrated (which I totally agree with but I don’t listen to them stil) and yet all the Seattle hot spots are references to Nirvana 😭
- If she lost all her memories after the age of 19 how come the 25ish years she’s trying to remember she doesn’t have a single chapter or song about anyone else other than Mallory. This one really bothered me. A chapter about some family situation or related to her job in a meaningful way not the little tidbits of her work barely mentioned. Nothing for any of her other friends? At least one chapter could have been without Mallory and would have given Jamie much needed depth.
- if the memory technology actually worked its terrifying how it would make people feel. It doesn’t talk about the tech in any meaningful way but seeing how it affects Jamie makes me think of how people could fall in love with abusive exs or get really conflicted feeling over major life events. Or any historical event having to relive. This bothered me how insistent the procedure was and how dangerous was without being clear with safe conversations. A procedure like this needs other medical specialists like counseling services and its glaring omission made my stomach churn.
- I just didn’t like Mallory and Jamie together. Maybe because their romantic relationship parts are solely sex focused and doesn’t feel like either of them are as good as they were as friends. I didn’t want to root for them and I didn’t care about their story around the 70% mark. It’s so surface level if feels like it lacks complexity and depth that existed in the early chapters then of course there thes mad dash to rush through years. I don’t understand how Jamie learned all her memories time jumping.
- any type of plot reveal was obvious well in advance.
I can keep on complaining about this one but at the end of the day I didn’t like it and I don’t recommend it.
I thought the breathy audiobook narration by Quinn Riley works for the story so that is my positive. I’d definitely listen to more of her. It’s also quite spicy and these scenes were well done. I hate when romance books use corny euphemisms and this one doesn’t.
I am gratefully for receiving an advanced copy of the audiobook from NetGalley and Tantor media. I hope others do enjoy this sapphic romance 💘
However i just can’t escape the struggle I feel when toxic relationships are glorified because of “love”.
The story follows Jamie in her mid forties trying to remember her past through a breakout technology that uses light patterns and music. Starting in the early AOL days of chat rooms and mix tapes we see a relationship traverse the decades with Mallory.
The relationship parts in the beginning I really liked. The nostalgia mixed with the queer identity of the 90s and time in early adulthood just really solid. It was after 2001 where I think the story falters significantly and it just becomes such a toxic mess.
I didn’t mind all the ups and downs of their relationship and the stages they go through and a lot of it does make sense but it does bother me when there was no growth, no effort them to work on being better and the sex scenes felt displaced as a result. It feels so much like infatuation and lust and I don’t think it was intended to and the disjointed moments really stand out.
Other huge problems I have (while keeping spoiler free).
- how the hell does a huge music lover working in the music industry in NYC during 2001 not mention The Blueprint by Jay-Z. Sure the MC loves grunge but she likes shitty pop music by all the references she makes to them (I mean a 23 year old being more excited for N*sync instead of Jay-z???). The Blueprint will forever be tied to NYC because of the songs but the day it came out and how it propelled people into moments of pride and love for a damaged city. To ignore this album - arguably one of Jay-z’s best albums and overall greatest rap albums of all time - is such a shame.
- the music choices are all radio hits and singles. That was really disappointing too. Liking the song Meet Virginia is also a -⭐️ the self proclaimed music snob being in love with American idol or whatever show it was and talking pop music is just another show of hypocrisy. Jamie has a mini rant about thinking Nirvana is overrated (which I totally agree with but I don’t listen to them stil) and yet all the Seattle hot spots are references to Nirvana 😭
- If she lost all her memories after the age of 19 how come the 25ish years she’s trying to remember she doesn’t have a single chapter or song about anyone else other than Mallory. This one really bothered me. A chapter about some family situation or related to her job in a meaningful way not the little tidbits of her work barely mentioned. Nothing for any of her other friends? At least one chapter could have been without Mallory and would have given Jamie much needed depth.
- if the memory technology actually worked its terrifying how it would make people feel. It doesn’t talk about the tech in any meaningful way but seeing how it affects Jamie makes me think of how people could fall in love with abusive exs or get really conflicted feeling over major life events. Or any historical event having to relive. This bothered me how insistent the procedure was and how dangerous was without being clear with safe conversations. A procedure like this needs other medical specialists like counseling services and its glaring omission made my stomach churn.
- I just didn’t like Mallory and Jamie together. Maybe because their romantic relationship parts are solely sex focused and doesn’t feel like either of them are as good as they were as friends. I didn’t want to root for them and I didn’t care about their story around the 70% mark. It’s so surface level if feels like it lacks complexity and depth that existed in the early chapters then of course there thes mad dash to rush through years. I don’t understand how Jamie learned all her memories time jumping.
- any type of plot reveal was obvious well in advance.
I can keep on complaining about this one but at the end of the day I didn’t like it and I don’t recommend it.
I thought the breathy audiobook narration by Quinn Riley works for the story so that is my positive. I’d definitely listen to more of her. It’s also quite spicy and these scenes were well done. I hate when romance books use corny euphemisms and this one doesn’t.
I am gratefully for receiving an advanced copy of the audiobook from NetGalley and Tantor media. I hope others do enjoy this sapphic romance 💘
August 18, 2026
I received an ALC of The Rewind Effect through NetGalley, and the second I saw Quinn Riley was narrating, I snatched this one up. She is a fantastic narrator, and she brought Jamie’s story to life in exactly the way it needed. The emotion, nostalgia, and different stages of Jamie’s life all came through beautifully.
This was my first book by Morgan Lee Miller, and I really enjoyed it.
After a car accident leaves Jamie without most of her memories, she begins using an experimental treatment to try to recover pieces of her past. Music becomes a huge part of that journey, taking her back through different moments of her life, beginning when she was nineteen.
As someone in my 40s, the nostalgia in this book hit so well. The AOL days, the music, the way people connected before social media became what it is today…it felt like getting little snapshots of an entirely different era. I especially loved how music was woven into the story as a way of unlocking Jamie’s memories. The song choices and the moments attached to them were such a fun part of the listening experience.
At the center of those memories is Mallory, Jamie’s first love.
We get to experience their relationship almost alongside Jamie as she remembers meeting Mallory, falling in love, and everything that followed. Their story spans decades and explores first love, long-distance relationships, jealousy, mistakes, heartbreak, forgiveness, second chances, and how complicated loving someone can become when you are both still figuring out who you are.
I also really enjoyed that this wasn’t a perfectly polished love story. Jamie and Mallory make mistakes. They hurt each other. They grow. Life takes them in different directions, and Jamie has to confront both the beautiful memories and the painful ones.
Overall, The Rewind Effect was an emotional, nostalgic, quick listen that kept me entertained from beginning to end. Quinn Riley’s narration made the experience even better, and I’ll absolutely be checking out more from Morgan Lee Miller.
This was my first book by Morgan Lee Miller, and I really enjoyed it.
After a car accident leaves Jamie without most of her memories, she begins using an experimental treatment to try to recover pieces of her past. Music becomes a huge part of that journey, taking her back through different moments of her life, beginning when she was nineteen.
As someone in my 40s, the nostalgia in this book hit so well. The AOL days, the music, the way people connected before social media became what it is today…it felt like getting little snapshots of an entirely different era. I especially loved how music was woven into the story as a way of unlocking Jamie’s memories. The song choices and the moments attached to them were such a fun part of the listening experience.
At the center of those memories is Mallory, Jamie’s first love.
We get to experience their relationship almost alongside Jamie as she remembers meeting Mallory, falling in love, and everything that followed. Their story spans decades and explores first love, long-distance relationships, jealousy, mistakes, heartbreak, forgiveness, second chances, and how complicated loving someone can become when you are both still figuring out who you are.
I also really enjoyed that this wasn’t a perfectly polished love story. Jamie and Mallory make mistakes. They hurt each other. They grow. Life takes them in different directions, and Jamie has to confront both the beautiful memories and the painful ones.
Overall, The Rewind Effect was an emotional, nostalgic, quick listen that kept me entertained from beginning to end. Quinn Riley’s narration made the experience even better, and I’ll absolutely be checking out more from Morgan Lee Miller.
August 15, 2026
Genuinely didn’t know how I would feel going into this book. Thought oh I’ll pick up a cute little book about someone getting their memories back. Instead I was taken on a trip to a nostalgic time with though song and memory.
The way Jamie’s life comes back to her is so beautiful, I felt like I was right there experiencing it all.
This was written in such an immersive way I was watching it all through Jamie’s eyes. I felt her excitement, her heartbreak, the anxiety after her sessions.
As a 33 year old this story took me back, the second aim chatrooms and Delilah radio got mentioned I was squealing.
The emotions in this are so raw and so relatable to everyone.
I think what also really tore at my heart was how Jamie got the opportunity to watch her life back with new eyes. The first time she experienced it she was young, and didn’t see her worth. Seeing it again through adult eyes changed it all and showed her just how loved she was free of that youthful insecurity.
I don’t want to give too much away because I think like Jamie you need to experience it all for yourself.
I was lucky enough to get to listen to this on netgalley and I think the audiobook really elevated this experience.
Morgan Lee Miller wrote a unique story with some beautiful characters and Quinn Riley does a phenomenal job of breathing life into them.
I could feel everything these characters were going through and hearing it through Quinn’s narration was on another level. The raw emotion and vulnerability really comes through.
I love this book so much already, prepare to cry from all kinds of emotions.
The way Jamie’s life comes back to her is so beautiful, I felt like I was right there experiencing it all.
This was written in such an immersive way I was watching it all through Jamie’s eyes. I felt her excitement, her heartbreak, the anxiety after her sessions.
As a 33 year old this story took me back, the second aim chatrooms and Delilah radio got mentioned I was squealing.
The emotions in this are so raw and so relatable to everyone.
I think what also really tore at my heart was how Jamie got the opportunity to watch her life back with new eyes. The first time she experienced it she was young, and didn’t see her worth. Seeing it again through adult eyes changed it all and showed her just how loved she was free of that youthful insecurity.
I don’t want to give too much away because I think like Jamie you need to experience it all for yourself.
I was lucky enough to get to listen to this on netgalley and I think the audiobook really elevated this experience.
Morgan Lee Miller wrote a unique story with some beautiful characters and Quinn Riley does a phenomenal job of breathing life into them.
I could feel everything these characters were going through and hearing it through Quinn’s narration was on another level. The raw emotion and vulnerability really comes through.
I love this book so much already, prepare to cry from all kinds of emotions.
July 30, 2026
The Rewind Effect follows Jamie, who loses years of her memories after a tragic car accident. Through an experimental music based therapy, she’s able to slowly recover them, with every memory leading her back to the girl she met on AOL in the late 90s.
I requested this book thinking it would be a cute, funny sapphic rom com. I couldn’t have been more wrong and I’m so glad I was.
This is one of the most beautiful, intimate and realistic portrayals of a relationship I’ve ever read. The story follows Jamie from her college years, through moving to the city and starting her career, all the way to her forties. At the heart of it all is her relationship with Mallory, the girl she met on AOL at the dawn of the internet.
This book captures so perfectly what it feels like to meet the love of your life when you’re so young and everything that comes with that, the joy, the heartbreak, the uncertainty, the longing and all the ways your lives grow together and apart over the years. It’s such a tender story, full of yearning and so much emotion.
I had to put this book down multiple times because I was crying so much. I loved experiencing everything through Jamie’s perspective, her love, her mistakes, her grief, her anger and her happiness. It genuinely felt like growing up alongside her, finding the people who become your family and never quite being able to let go of the girl who changed your life all those years ago.
The nostalgia was another thing I absolutely loved. The late 90s and early 2000s felt so vivid and the music woven throughout the story made it even more special.
The ending had me crying and smiling at the same time and I don’t think I’ll be forgetting this story anytime soon. I don’t want to say much more because I truly think this is a story that’s best experienced going in almost completely blind. This is easily one of the best books I’ve read all year and I immediately wanted to pick up everything Morgan Lee Miller has ever written.
An easy 5 stars. A perfect read.
This book comes out on 08/11/26.
Thank you so much netgalley and Bold Strokes Books for the Arc!
I requested this book thinking it would be a cute, funny sapphic rom com. I couldn’t have been more wrong and I’m so glad I was.
This is one of the most beautiful, intimate and realistic portrayals of a relationship I’ve ever read. The story follows Jamie from her college years, through moving to the city and starting her career, all the way to her forties. At the heart of it all is her relationship with Mallory, the girl she met on AOL at the dawn of the internet.
This book captures so perfectly what it feels like to meet the love of your life when you’re so young and everything that comes with that, the joy, the heartbreak, the uncertainty, the longing and all the ways your lives grow together and apart over the years. It’s such a tender story, full of yearning and so much emotion.
I had to put this book down multiple times because I was crying so much. I loved experiencing everything through Jamie’s perspective, her love, her mistakes, her grief, her anger and her happiness. It genuinely felt like growing up alongside her, finding the people who become your family and never quite being able to let go of the girl who changed your life all those years ago.
The nostalgia was another thing I absolutely loved. The late 90s and early 2000s felt so vivid and the music woven throughout the story made it even more special.
The ending had me crying and smiling at the same time and I don’t think I’ll be forgetting this story anytime soon. I don’t want to say much more because I truly think this is a story that’s best experienced going in almost completely blind. This is easily one of the best books I’ve read all year and I immediately wanted to pick up everything Morgan Lee Miller has ever written.
An easy 5 stars. A perfect read.
This book comes out on 08/11/26.
Thank you so much netgalley and Bold Strokes Books for the Arc!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The Heart Remembers. Unfortunately, So Does Everything Else.
Morgan Lee Miller’s “The Rewind Effect” gives first love a neurological encore – complete with old songs, old jealousy, and the bill for old mistakes
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 7th, 2026
Disaster leaves Jamie Kessler with a forty-five-year-old life and only nineteen years of usable testimony. After a car accident erases nearly all of her adult autobiographical memory, she wakes knowing facts without experience: she works in music, comes from Virginia, has an older sister, remembers adolescence and the first tremors of queer desire. Most of what followed is blank. Amnesia initially grants her the procedural innocence of someone who cannot remember what she did. Morgan Lee Miller’s “The Rewind Effect” spends its best pages taking that innocence away. Jamie must recover the woman she loved, certainly, but also the woman she was while loving her – including the choices that helped ruin what she most wanted to keep.
Experimental medicine is how Miller makes the missing decades speak. At a neurological institute in Malibu, Jamie undergoes OAST, a fictional treatment pairing light stimulation with personally meaningful music. Songs become trapdoors. Oasis returns a teenage Ford Fiesta, Big Red gum and Jamie’s first sexual experience with a woman; Radiohead leads her toward college; later tracks recover apartments, bodies, arguments, careers and grief. The medicine need not survive peer review to do its fictional job, and music is less decoration here than method. Miller is better with the odd sequence of recollection itself: taste before chronology, a guitar figure before the room around it, bodily recognition before biography catches up.
Memory first returns Jamie to 1998 and an AOL lesbian chatroom, where ItsJamie97 meets MalRooE80. Their courtship begins when intimacy can still be assembled from typed jokes, a screen name and the nerve required to send a private message. They trade Claire Danes references and music opinions; 11:11 becomes ritual; a telephone call can feel nearly ceremonial. Fruitopia, Walkmans and Lilith Fair date the scene, but the retro pleasure is not finally about remembering discontinued beverages. For a closeted nineteen-year-old in Virginia, an F4F room is proof that lesbian life exists elsewhere in ordinary, funny, flirtatious numbers. The internet does not merely introduce Mallory. It enlarges the imaginable world.
Eventually the women meet, and distance acquires a smell. Mallory gives Jamie a sweatshirt carrying her scent. Seattle becomes both grunge pilgrimage and courtship; New Year’s Eve 1999 turns friendship into sex and love. Miller understands the humble residues of long-distance intimacy: detergent, perfume, borrowed clothing, the peculiar intimacy of a voice known before a face. The sweatshirt is especially good because it does not need to symbolize much to matter. Sometimes longing is simply sleeping in somebody else’s clothes because the country is inconveniently large.
The treatment room changes meaning when Jamie surfaces from one of these memories, looks at the reserved Dr. Wilson beside her and realizes she is looking at Mallory. Not a resemblance, not a relative – Mallory herself, twenty-five years older and carrying another surname. From then on, every session has a double exposure. Jamie inhabits the young Mallory while the older woman sits a few feet away, already knowing the ending Jamie has not reached. The beloved being reconstructed is also supervising the reconstruction. A high-concept hook acquires a discomfort the book cannot entirely charm away.
Reunion, once Jamie reaches it in the recovered past, does not stay suspended in youthful longing. She and Mallory build a shared life: apartments, intertwined families, careers, ordinary habits. Mallory’s father, Alan, develops early-onset dementia, eventually turning her toward neurology and giving her research its private motive. Jamie moves from music journalism into A&R. Domesticity is where the book stops being merely about the glow of first love. Once the women share a household, losing Mallory no longer means losing an ideal. It means losing routines, family obligations, bad workdays, the person who knows which silence means leave me alone and which means please stay. Alan’s decline also keeps OAST from floating free as handy plot science: Mallory’s fascination with recall grows from watching music briefly return recognizable pieces of her father.
In Jamie, Miller has a narrator so insistently present that even amnesia cannot quiet her. She is profane, horny, funny, sentimental, impatient and musically judgmental. Biography has vanished; temperament has not. Taste, appetite, humor and attraction survive where chronology does not. Jamie’s immediate interest in Dr. Wilson before recognizing her is both gag and instinct. The mind has misplaced twenty-five years; the eye, apparently, kept better records.
Plenty of Jamie is the point; occasionally, it is also the problem. Miller favors quick declaratives, fragments, bantering dialogue and longer rushes when memory floods her. The prose moves quickly, but Jamie often supplies the sensation, the joke about it, the metaphor for it and then the explanation of what it meant. A scene lands, and the narration occasionally sends a forwarding address. The same surplus affects the period texture: several references create atmosphere; a dozen begin to resemble inventory. Miller controls Jamie’s voice firmly. She is less disciplined about when that voice should leave some air in the room.
As the sessions continue, OAST controls what Jamie remembers and when the novel is allowed to know it. Paige and Mallory cannot simply fill in the missing decades without risking contamination of Jamie’s recollections, so disclosure arrives at the speed of memory rather than at the convenience of exposition. This turns backstory into suspense: Why is Mallory now Dr. Wilson? What happened between them? Why was Jamie in California before the crash? The procedure can settle into a visible rhythm – song, memory, clinic, next song – but it also makes Jamie’s musical life formally necessary. Liane Moriarty’s “What Alice Forgot” likewise estranges a woman from the life she made; Miller adds the peculiar severity of making Jamie watch the decisive scenes from inside the person who made the mistakes.
Past Jamie becomes hardest to defend when Kelly enters the story. Mallory once ended their long-distance relationship to pursue Candice, a nearby woman, and the fear of replacement survives the couple’s later reconciliation. Years afterward, when Mallory grows close to fellow neurologist Kelly, Jamie treats proximity itself as evidence. Mallory says Kelly’s feelings are not reciprocated. Jamie cannot accept the reassurance. Mallory repeats herself; Jamie distrusts repetition; Mallory withdraws; Jamie reads withdrawal as proof. When both women receive fellowships in California, Jamie sees betrayal inside a professional triumph Mallory wants her to share. Love has become an interrogation in which reassurance is inadmissible.
Amnesia earns its place in the novel when present Jamie has to endure the 2010 breakup without the privilege of intervention. She understands why the younger woman is frightened, but explanation is not acquittal. OAST restores what happened to Jamie and, more painfully, Jamie’s authorship of what happened next. She discovers that she was capable of loving Mallory intensely while using that love to justify behavior that made intimacy harder. Amnesia has spared her the memory of guilt, not its authorship.
During the fourteen years after the breakup, the novel grows wider and thinner. Jamie builds a successful A&R career, her family expands, and she loves other women. Mallory eventually marries Kelly. Jamie spends three years with Amanda, a relationship the book treats as real rather than filler. Neither woman waits in amber. Yet Jamie and Mallory receive scenes while much of these alternative lives arrives in synopsis. Amanda matters, but we experience comparatively little of the relationship that proves Jamie can love after Mallory. That asymmetry matters because the novel later invokes those intervening loves as evidence of maturity while giving us less chance to inhabit them. The ending is partly decided by where Miller spends her pages.
In 2024, when Jamie learns that Mallory is divorcing Kelly, Miller has to decide how much reality to grant the marriage that came after Jamie. Mallory describes it as loving but eventually insufficient, a partnership that became “good enough” beside the charge she once knew with Jamie. Jamie recognizes the same ranking in her own life. The path back to first love is now conveniently clear. A more difficult version could have let Mallory love Kelly enormously and Jamie love Amanda enormously without making either attachment a lesser draft of the right one. Then reunion would be a choice among lives that all counted, not proof that first love had been quietly winning for twenty-five years.
More troubling is how quickly the novel abandons its own warning that memory can be contaminated. Jamie is told that photographs, stories and outside information may alter recollection, briefly raising the possibility that remembering is reconstruction rather than retrieval. Yet her recovered past is astonishingly obedient – chronological, sensorially rich, conversationally complete. Rooms return; sex returns; arguments return with their meanings attached. No consequential recollection later proves substantially wrong. Miller opens the door to a less trustworthy past, then elects not to walk through it. The romance becomes easier to settle; the premise becomes a little less strange.
In the last recovered memory, past and present finally meet. Jamie and Mallory reunite in 2024 after fourteen years apart. Mallory reveals the impending divorce; Kelly’s name reactivates Jamie’s resentment; the women reenact the emotional logic of 2010. Jamie leaves furious. Then she realizes, almost at once, that she has performed the old mistake with astonishing fidelity. This time recognition arrives before years of silence can follow. She turns the car around to go back and apologize. Headlights appear. The crash that erased Jamie’s memories occurred because she had finally decided not to repeat herself.
That U-turn is almost offensively neat as symbolism, but neatness occasionally earns its keep. The novel has spent hundreds of pages rewinding, and Jamie’s final remembered act is literally to reverse direction. More important, the accident is no longer arbitrary misfortune. It interrupts a change Jamie had already begun making before OAST restored the reasons for it. Seconds before her old life vanished, she chose repair over departure. The satisfying part is not that plot, title and character align. It is that the book makes a metaphor out of an action Jamie actually has to take.
Responsibility is not left entirely on Jamie’s side. Mallory admits that she, too, became cold and punitive, and later reveals that she underwent OAST during Jamie’s treatment because she did not want to care for Jamie while trapped inside anger from a fight Jamie could no longer remember. Mallory’s treatment keeps Jamie from being the only one sentenced to meet her former self. It also gives their history a second witness, which matters because Jamie’s recovered account would otherwise dominate the moral record. Her resentment is not disproved; it is placed beside the tenderness, fear and bad decisions that produced it. Neither woman gets to keep the version of the past in which only the other one failed.
One awkward fact refuses to disappear into romance: Mallory is Jamie’s former lover, the object of her returning desire and one of the physicians overseeing the procedure through which that desire is being restored. Miller recognizes the doctor-ex-lover problem, building in Dr. Singh, supervision and informed consent, and she postpones overt reunion until treatment ends. Those safeguards matter without making the situation neutral. The arrangement can feel thrillingly charged or clinically dubious; either way, an ethics committee seems to hover just beyond the exam-room door. That discomfort keeps the premise from becoming entirely wish fulfillment.
Paired across a quarter century, AOL and OAST make the book’s neatest rhyme. At nineteen, Jamie uses one technology to discover that queer life extends beyond the limits of her immediate world. At forty-five, another restores the history that first connection produced. One lets her find Mallory; the other lets her find the self who loved Mallory. The social distance between those moments is considerable: an anonymous F4F chatroom at one end, two middle-aged women able to make their private promise legally ordinary at the other. Miller leaves that history in the background, where it registers through what Jamie can first only type anonymously and what, decades later, she can say in public without asking permission.
On the page, “The Rewind Effect” is often more pleasurable than its final romantic certainty is convincing. I’d place it at 79/100, or 3/5 stars. Its structure is more disciplined than its prose, and it understands jealousy, shame and repair more deeply than it understands the plurality of adult love. The book’s best move is to make Jamie recover authorship of the damage she once helped cause. Its compromise is to let that difficult knowledge complicate her innocence while allowing it, finally, to simplify whom she was meant to love.
Under the epilogue’s courthouse wedding, another image keeps moving. Jamie is in the car, minutes before the accident, realizing she has reached the old mistake again and turning back. That is where the title does its finest work. A rewind can return the song, the argument, the smell of a sweatshirt, even the person one used to be. Revision begins only when the familiar road reappears and someone, at last, takes the turn differently.
Morgan Lee Miller’s “The Rewind Effect” gives first love a neurological encore – complete with old songs, old jealousy, and the bill for old mistakes
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 7th, 2026
Disaster leaves Jamie Kessler with a forty-five-year-old life and only nineteen years of usable testimony. After a car accident erases nearly all of her adult autobiographical memory, she wakes knowing facts without experience: she works in music, comes from Virginia, has an older sister, remembers adolescence and the first tremors of queer desire. Most of what followed is blank. Amnesia initially grants her the procedural innocence of someone who cannot remember what she did. Morgan Lee Miller’s “The Rewind Effect” spends its best pages taking that innocence away. Jamie must recover the woman she loved, certainly, but also the woman she was while loving her – including the choices that helped ruin what she most wanted to keep.
Experimental medicine is how Miller makes the missing decades speak. At a neurological institute in Malibu, Jamie undergoes OAST, a fictional treatment pairing light stimulation with personally meaningful music. Songs become trapdoors. Oasis returns a teenage Ford Fiesta, Big Red gum and Jamie’s first sexual experience with a woman; Radiohead leads her toward college; later tracks recover apartments, bodies, arguments, careers and grief. The medicine need not survive peer review to do its fictional job, and music is less decoration here than method. Miller is better with the odd sequence of recollection itself: taste before chronology, a guitar figure before the room around it, bodily recognition before biography catches up.
Memory first returns Jamie to 1998 and an AOL lesbian chatroom, where ItsJamie97 meets MalRooE80. Their courtship begins when intimacy can still be assembled from typed jokes, a screen name and the nerve required to send a private message. They trade Claire Danes references and music opinions; 11:11 becomes ritual; a telephone call can feel nearly ceremonial. Fruitopia, Walkmans and Lilith Fair date the scene, but the retro pleasure is not finally about remembering discontinued beverages. For a closeted nineteen-year-old in Virginia, an F4F room is proof that lesbian life exists elsewhere in ordinary, funny, flirtatious numbers. The internet does not merely introduce Mallory. It enlarges the imaginable world.
Eventually the women meet, and distance acquires a smell. Mallory gives Jamie a sweatshirt carrying her scent. Seattle becomes both grunge pilgrimage and courtship; New Year’s Eve 1999 turns friendship into sex and love. Miller understands the humble residues of long-distance intimacy: detergent, perfume, borrowed clothing, the peculiar intimacy of a voice known before a face. The sweatshirt is especially good because it does not need to symbolize much to matter. Sometimes longing is simply sleeping in somebody else’s clothes because the country is inconveniently large.
The treatment room changes meaning when Jamie surfaces from one of these memories, looks at the reserved Dr. Wilson beside her and realizes she is looking at Mallory. Not a resemblance, not a relative – Mallory herself, twenty-five years older and carrying another surname. From then on, every session has a double exposure. Jamie inhabits the young Mallory while the older woman sits a few feet away, already knowing the ending Jamie has not reached. The beloved being reconstructed is also supervising the reconstruction. A high-concept hook acquires a discomfort the book cannot entirely charm away.
Reunion, once Jamie reaches it in the recovered past, does not stay suspended in youthful longing. She and Mallory build a shared life: apartments, intertwined families, careers, ordinary habits. Mallory’s father, Alan, develops early-onset dementia, eventually turning her toward neurology and giving her research its private motive. Jamie moves from music journalism into A&R. Domesticity is where the book stops being merely about the glow of first love. Once the women share a household, losing Mallory no longer means losing an ideal. It means losing routines, family obligations, bad workdays, the person who knows which silence means leave me alone and which means please stay. Alan’s decline also keeps OAST from floating free as handy plot science: Mallory’s fascination with recall grows from watching music briefly return recognizable pieces of her father.
In Jamie, Miller has a narrator so insistently present that even amnesia cannot quiet her. She is profane, horny, funny, sentimental, impatient and musically judgmental. Biography has vanished; temperament has not. Taste, appetite, humor and attraction survive where chronology does not. Jamie’s immediate interest in Dr. Wilson before recognizing her is both gag and instinct. The mind has misplaced twenty-five years; the eye, apparently, kept better records.
Plenty of Jamie is the point; occasionally, it is also the problem. Miller favors quick declaratives, fragments, bantering dialogue and longer rushes when memory floods her. The prose moves quickly, but Jamie often supplies the sensation, the joke about it, the metaphor for it and then the explanation of what it meant. A scene lands, and the narration occasionally sends a forwarding address. The same surplus affects the period texture: several references create atmosphere; a dozen begin to resemble inventory. Miller controls Jamie’s voice firmly. She is less disciplined about when that voice should leave some air in the room.
As the sessions continue, OAST controls what Jamie remembers and when the novel is allowed to know it. Paige and Mallory cannot simply fill in the missing decades without risking contamination of Jamie’s recollections, so disclosure arrives at the speed of memory rather than at the convenience of exposition. This turns backstory into suspense: Why is Mallory now Dr. Wilson? What happened between them? Why was Jamie in California before the crash? The procedure can settle into a visible rhythm – song, memory, clinic, next song – but it also makes Jamie’s musical life formally necessary. Liane Moriarty’s “What Alice Forgot” likewise estranges a woman from the life she made; Miller adds the peculiar severity of making Jamie watch the decisive scenes from inside the person who made the mistakes.
Past Jamie becomes hardest to defend when Kelly enters the story. Mallory once ended their long-distance relationship to pursue Candice, a nearby woman, and the fear of replacement survives the couple’s later reconciliation. Years afterward, when Mallory grows close to fellow neurologist Kelly, Jamie treats proximity itself as evidence. Mallory says Kelly’s feelings are not reciprocated. Jamie cannot accept the reassurance. Mallory repeats herself; Jamie distrusts repetition; Mallory withdraws; Jamie reads withdrawal as proof. When both women receive fellowships in California, Jamie sees betrayal inside a professional triumph Mallory wants her to share. Love has become an interrogation in which reassurance is inadmissible.
Amnesia earns its place in the novel when present Jamie has to endure the 2010 breakup without the privilege of intervention. She understands why the younger woman is frightened, but explanation is not acquittal. OAST restores what happened to Jamie and, more painfully, Jamie’s authorship of what happened next. She discovers that she was capable of loving Mallory intensely while using that love to justify behavior that made intimacy harder. Amnesia has spared her the memory of guilt, not its authorship.
During the fourteen years after the breakup, the novel grows wider and thinner. Jamie builds a successful A&R career, her family expands, and she loves other women. Mallory eventually marries Kelly. Jamie spends three years with Amanda, a relationship the book treats as real rather than filler. Neither woman waits in amber. Yet Jamie and Mallory receive scenes while much of these alternative lives arrives in synopsis. Amanda matters, but we experience comparatively little of the relationship that proves Jamie can love after Mallory. That asymmetry matters because the novel later invokes those intervening loves as evidence of maturity while giving us less chance to inhabit them. The ending is partly decided by where Miller spends her pages.
In 2024, when Jamie learns that Mallory is divorcing Kelly, Miller has to decide how much reality to grant the marriage that came after Jamie. Mallory describes it as loving but eventually insufficient, a partnership that became “good enough” beside the charge she once knew with Jamie. Jamie recognizes the same ranking in her own life. The path back to first love is now conveniently clear. A more difficult version could have let Mallory love Kelly enormously and Jamie love Amanda enormously without making either attachment a lesser draft of the right one. Then reunion would be a choice among lives that all counted, not proof that first love had been quietly winning for twenty-five years.
More troubling is how quickly the novel abandons its own warning that memory can be contaminated. Jamie is told that photographs, stories and outside information may alter recollection, briefly raising the possibility that remembering is reconstruction rather than retrieval. Yet her recovered past is astonishingly obedient – chronological, sensorially rich, conversationally complete. Rooms return; sex returns; arguments return with their meanings attached. No consequential recollection later proves substantially wrong. Miller opens the door to a less trustworthy past, then elects not to walk through it. The romance becomes easier to settle; the premise becomes a little less strange.
In the last recovered memory, past and present finally meet. Jamie and Mallory reunite in 2024 after fourteen years apart. Mallory reveals the impending divorce; Kelly’s name reactivates Jamie’s resentment; the women reenact the emotional logic of 2010. Jamie leaves furious. Then she realizes, almost at once, that she has performed the old mistake with astonishing fidelity. This time recognition arrives before years of silence can follow. She turns the car around to go back and apologize. Headlights appear. The crash that erased Jamie’s memories occurred because she had finally decided not to repeat herself.
That U-turn is almost offensively neat as symbolism, but neatness occasionally earns its keep. The novel has spent hundreds of pages rewinding, and Jamie’s final remembered act is literally to reverse direction. More important, the accident is no longer arbitrary misfortune. It interrupts a change Jamie had already begun making before OAST restored the reasons for it. Seconds before her old life vanished, she chose repair over departure. The satisfying part is not that plot, title and character align. It is that the book makes a metaphor out of an action Jamie actually has to take.
Responsibility is not left entirely on Jamie’s side. Mallory admits that she, too, became cold and punitive, and later reveals that she underwent OAST during Jamie’s treatment because she did not want to care for Jamie while trapped inside anger from a fight Jamie could no longer remember. Mallory’s treatment keeps Jamie from being the only one sentenced to meet her former self. It also gives their history a second witness, which matters because Jamie’s recovered account would otherwise dominate the moral record. Her resentment is not disproved; it is placed beside the tenderness, fear and bad decisions that produced it. Neither woman gets to keep the version of the past in which only the other one failed.
One awkward fact refuses to disappear into romance: Mallory is Jamie’s former lover, the object of her returning desire and one of the physicians overseeing the procedure through which that desire is being restored. Miller recognizes the doctor-ex-lover problem, building in Dr. Singh, supervision and informed consent, and she postpones overt reunion until treatment ends. Those safeguards matter without making the situation neutral. The arrangement can feel thrillingly charged or clinically dubious; either way, an ethics committee seems to hover just beyond the exam-room door. That discomfort keeps the premise from becoming entirely wish fulfillment.
Paired across a quarter century, AOL and OAST make the book’s neatest rhyme. At nineteen, Jamie uses one technology to discover that queer life extends beyond the limits of her immediate world. At forty-five, another restores the history that first connection produced. One lets her find Mallory; the other lets her find the self who loved Mallory. The social distance between those moments is considerable: an anonymous F4F chatroom at one end, two middle-aged women able to make their private promise legally ordinary at the other. Miller leaves that history in the background, where it registers through what Jamie can first only type anonymously and what, decades later, she can say in public without asking permission.
On the page, “The Rewind Effect” is often more pleasurable than its final romantic certainty is convincing. I’d place it at 79/100, or 3/5 stars. Its structure is more disciplined than its prose, and it understands jealousy, shame and repair more deeply than it understands the plurality of adult love. The book’s best move is to make Jamie recover authorship of the damage she once helped cause. Its compromise is to let that difficult knowledge complicate her innocence while allowing it, finally, to simplify whom she was meant to love.
Under the epilogue’s courthouse wedding, another image keeps moving. Jamie is in the car, minutes before the accident, realizing she has reached the old mistake again and turning back. That is where the title does its finest work. A rewind can return the song, the argument, the smell of a sweatshirt, even the person one used to be. Revision begins only when the familiar road reappears and someone, at last, takes the turn differently.
September 1, 2026
Special thanks to NetGalley, Bold Strokes Books and author Moran Lee Miller for this wonderful ARC opportunity. I am thrilled to share my honest review!
I was completely blown away by this book. It truly broke me apart and put me back together piece by piece. I was beyond excited for Morgan Lee Miller’s newest book as I absolutely loved her last one. The cover art for this book was incredibly eye-catching and the premise captivated me completely. The Rewind Effect was incredible! I absolutely loved this book and found it to be wonderfully unique, emotional and deeply moving. There is so much to love about this epic second chance romance and I was glued to each and every word.
Goodness gracious, this entire book was simply incredible! Jamie is in a car accident and as a result has lost most of her past memories. She undergoes a breakthrough music based neurological treatment to regain her memories and take her life back. The result is one of the most beautiful and heartwrenching love stories I've ever read. The treatment takes place over a week and every day Jamie selects a few songs that were meaningful to her at different points in her life in an effort to remember the past 27 years. The journey Jamie travels is unlike any other and she is able to relive the best and worst moments of her life through fresh eyes. She experiences finding herself, making the best of friends, living awful tragedies and falling in love with the love of her life…only to lose her and never quite recover from it. The love story between Jamie and Mallory has spanned over two decades and is told through the unique lens of remembering but also reliving your own life. It is such a poignant and moving story. Their love was real, so beautiful and most definitely everlasting.
I loved traveling back in time to yummy frutopia, AOL chatrooms, awesome 90’s music and all of the glory of the 2000’s! That was my time and it felt like going home to me. The fact that Mallory and Jamie met in a f4f AOL chatroom and endured the over decades was delightfully surprising. The story is written through Jamie’s POV and I worried that a single point of view might stifle things but it didn't. I got to know Jamie and Mallory through their shared experiences and found them both to be incredible women. The writing was addictive. It was sweet, funny, heartwarming and honest, written with so much depth and heart. I fell in love with Jamie and Mallory. I was so invested in them that I was moved to tears so many times throughout this. I believed in them whole heartedly and watching them fall in love and bring out the best in one another only to allow their precious love to be lost because of insecurities and external forces…I was a mess to say the least. But this book is so full of hope and I knew they’d find their way back together…even if it took 14 years. Their big explosive sparks never faded and it was so clear that they never stopped loving each other. Swoon & sniffle. Morgan Lee Miller has out done herself with this book and has created a magical journey through a lifetime with one of the most epic love stories ever! The spice is done to absolute perfection. Every scene was so beautifully written and full of emotion, passion and love but also so sooo hot! Bravo Morgan Lee Miller!
This is far and away the best sapphic romance that I have read this year and one that will live on in my heart and mind forever. Miller created the most unique, clever, creative and immersive flashback stories I have ever read. I felt like I was there with Jamie every step of the way and it made me so emotional. I literally dreamed about the characters in this book as I was reading and that is a first for me! I am not sure I will be able to stop thinking about Jamie and Mallory and will most definitely be reading this one again. I can't recommend this book enough! This is a definite must read for anyone looking for a beautiful and emotional sapphic romance that will undoubtedly make you feel your heart break and then be mended again. A truly wonderful book! I can’t wait to read this one again and I strongly encourage you to stop reading this review and start reading this fantastic book!
I was completely blown away by this book. It truly broke me apart and put me back together piece by piece. I was beyond excited for Morgan Lee Miller’s newest book as I absolutely loved her last one. The cover art for this book was incredibly eye-catching and the premise captivated me completely. The Rewind Effect was incredible! I absolutely loved this book and found it to be wonderfully unique, emotional and deeply moving. There is so much to love about this epic second chance romance and I was glued to each and every word.
Goodness gracious, this entire book was simply incredible! Jamie is in a car accident and as a result has lost most of her past memories. She undergoes a breakthrough music based neurological treatment to regain her memories and take her life back. The result is one of the most beautiful and heartwrenching love stories I've ever read. The treatment takes place over a week and every day Jamie selects a few songs that were meaningful to her at different points in her life in an effort to remember the past 27 years. The journey Jamie travels is unlike any other and she is able to relive the best and worst moments of her life through fresh eyes. She experiences finding herself, making the best of friends, living awful tragedies and falling in love with the love of her life…only to lose her and never quite recover from it. The love story between Jamie and Mallory has spanned over two decades and is told through the unique lens of remembering but also reliving your own life. It is such a poignant and moving story. Their love was real, so beautiful and most definitely everlasting.
I loved traveling back in time to yummy frutopia, AOL chatrooms, awesome 90’s music and all of the glory of the 2000’s! That was my time and it felt like going home to me. The fact that Mallory and Jamie met in a f4f AOL chatroom and endured the over decades was delightfully surprising. The story is written through Jamie’s POV and I worried that a single point of view might stifle things but it didn't. I got to know Jamie and Mallory through their shared experiences and found them both to be incredible women. The writing was addictive. It was sweet, funny, heartwarming and honest, written with so much depth and heart. I fell in love with Jamie and Mallory. I was so invested in them that I was moved to tears so many times throughout this. I believed in them whole heartedly and watching them fall in love and bring out the best in one another only to allow their precious love to be lost because of insecurities and external forces…I was a mess to say the least. But this book is so full of hope and I knew they’d find their way back together…even if it took 14 years. Their big explosive sparks never faded and it was so clear that they never stopped loving each other. Swoon & sniffle. Morgan Lee Miller has out done herself with this book and has created a magical journey through a lifetime with one of the most epic love stories ever! The spice is done to absolute perfection. Every scene was so beautifully written and full of emotion, passion and love but also so sooo hot! Bravo Morgan Lee Miller!
This is far and away the best sapphic romance that I have read this year and one that will live on in my heart and mind forever. Miller created the most unique, clever, creative and immersive flashback stories I have ever read. I felt like I was there with Jamie every step of the way and it made me so emotional. I literally dreamed about the characters in this book as I was reading and that is a first for me! I am not sure I will be able to stop thinking about Jamie and Mallory and will most definitely be reading this one again. I can't recommend this book enough! This is a definite must read for anyone looking for a beautiful and emotional sapphic romance that will undoubtedly make you feel your heart break and then be mended again. A truly wonderful book! I can’t wait to read this one again and I strongly encourage you to stop reading this review and start reading this fantastic book!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
It’s been 24 hours since finishing this book, and I am still actively thinking about it.
THE CHARACTERS
Jamie is in her forties when the accident happens, leaving her with memories from her teenage years. I am in my mid to end 20s, and Jamie felt, in the beginning, younger than me, and quite relatable, which makes sense. As the chapters progressed, her mental age grew, but she still stayed relatable to me.
Despite all the flashbacks, it’s fairly easy to keep track of all the characters! As the main story is about Jamie and Mallory, we don’t learn too much about anyone else, sadly. I would have loved to learn more about certain characters and their relationships towards/with Jamie, as she is more than just the woman who crushes on Mallory. It bothered me a bit how Mallory was always on her mind. However, the story is about THEIR story, as said in the abstract, so it made sense, and I lowkey would love to read this entire story from Mallory’s POV as well. As a lesbian myself, their relationship felt realistic: it was beautiful, messy, there was joy, there were mistakes, it had so many feelings.
THE STORY & REALISM
As the experimental procedure is set in a couple of days, the story felt quite fast-paced. When I googled, the title of the procedure existed, but it was completely different. I’m not sure if it exists, but it’s quite believable, as music therapy is used in relation to the brain. I actually loved the concept a lot, I keep thinking about it. Like PLEASE give me more with this concept.
It makes sense that the memories Jamie recovers are mostly connected to Mallory, as it’s the thing Jamie wants to explore the most as well. I like that certain events were mentioned, and I remember there being a moment where my heart just STOPPED. You’ll know it when you get there. I didn't know many of the songs mentioned (whoops), but I loved how every song connected properly with the flashback.
There is spice in this book. I am not always the biggest fan of the spice, and I wouldn’t have minded a bit less spice, but I did like that most of the spice was part of the story and not just there to make it spicy.
THE WRITING & COVER
English is not my native language, but reading this book was very, very doable. The things I had to look up were more age-related (sorry for making people feel old, I did not know what AOL was). The writing is very easy and flowy to read; I ended up reading the entire book in 2 goes! You just want to keep reading and discovering what is happening and where it’s going.
The cover is cute, it's quite fitting for the story! and definitely catches your eye. The cover and abstract is one of the reasons I requested this arc.
CONCLUSION
I just kept wanting to read and discovering where we were going. I ended up settling for 3,5, rounded up to 4, stars as I really would have loved to read more about Jamie outside of her relationship with Mallory (her job also seemed so interesting to me). It’s also a bit more tell than show to me, but the experimental concept alone is *chef’s kiss*. The storyline also definitely has all the feels! And the ending... Oh, the ending... It's beautiful.
Thank you to Bold Strokes Books for the arc and NetGalley for giving me to opportunity. Lastly, thank you, Morgan Lee Miller, for writing a lovely book!
THE CHARACTERS
Jamie is in her forties when the accident happens, leaving her with memories from her teenage years. I am in my mid to end 20s, and Jamie felt, in the beginning, younger than me, and quite relatable, which makes sense. As the chapters progressed, her mental age grew, but she still stayed relatable to me.
Despite all the flashbacks, it’s fairly easy to keep track of all the characters! As the main story is about Jamie and Mallory, we don’t learn too much about anyone else, sadly. I would have loved to learn more about certain characters and their relationships towards/with Jamie, as she is more than just the woman who crushes on Mallory. It bothered me a bit how Mallory was always on her mind. However, the story is about THEIR story, as said in the abstract, so it made sense, and I lowkey would love to read this entire story from Mallory’s POV as well. As a lesbian myself, their relationship felt realistic: it was beautiful, messy, there was joy, there were mistakes, it had so many feelings.
THE STORY & REALISM
As the experimental procedure is set in a couple of days, the story felt quite fast-paced. When I googled, the title of the procedure existed, but it was completely different. I’m not sure if it exists, but it’s quite believable, as music therapy is used in relation to the brain. I actually loved the concept a lot, I keep thinking about it. Like PLEASE give me more with this concept.
It makes sense that the memories Jamie recovers are mostly connected to Mallory, as it’s the thing Jamie wants to explore the most as well. I like that certain events were mentioned, and I remember there being a moment where my heart just STOPPED. You’ll know it when you get there. I didn't know many of the songs mentioned (whoops), but I loved how every song connected properly with the flashback.
There is spice in this book. I am not always the biggest fan of the spice, and I wouldn’t have minded a bit less spice, but I did like that most of the spice was part of the story and not just there to make it spicy.
THE WRITING & COVER
English is not my native language, but reading this book was very, very doable. The things I had to look up were more age-related (sorry for making people feel old, I did not know what AOL was). The writing is very easy and flowy to read; I ended up reading the entire book in 2 goes! You just want to keep reading and discovering what is happening and where it’s going.
The cover is cute, it's quite fitting for the story! and definitely catches your eye. The cover and abstract is one of the reasons I requested this arc.
CONCLUSION
I just kept wanting to read and discovering where we were going. I ended up settling for 3,5, rounded up to 4, stars as I really would have loved to read more about Jamie outside of her relationship with Mallory (her job also seemed so interesting to me). It’s also a bit more tell than show to me, but the experimental concept alone is *chef’s kiss*. The storyline also definitely has all the feels! And the ending... Oh, the ending... It's beautiful.
Thank you to Bold Strokes Books for the arc and NetGalley for giving me to opportunity. Lastly, thank you, Morgan Lee Miller, for writing a lovely book!
August 18, 2026
Spice Level: 3/5 Explicit Open-Door
Jamie Kessler was in a car accident and the memories from most of her life have been lost to amnesia. She agrees to go under an experimental procedure to get those memories back. What she didn’t bargain for was reliving the trials and tribulations of her amnesia induced forgotten love of Mallory Ziegler. Someone who seems close, yet, so far away. This procedure isn’t a guaranteed success. Will Jamie get her memories back?
I received this audiobook from NetGalley and the author in return for my honest review. For me, one of the things I loved about this book was the nostalgia. A large part of this book takes place during the beginning of the internet and AOL chatrooms and having to yell at someone to get off the phone to use the internet or vice versa. There is one thing I have to say that is unrealistic about this book (and I mean unrealistic as a joke) that there is no mention of calling cards or collect calls. Jamie and Mallory live on opposite ends of the United States and do a lot of talking over the phone, landline phones. They would have racked up some bills talking to each other.
This audiobook does cover the time period of September 11th. A couple chapters of the book are dedicated to this time period so this is a trigger warning. I appreciate how the author puts a character in the midst of NYC when this terror occurs and you can really get a sense of the feelings someone may have been going through that day. Those of older generations won’t forget that day or where they were when it happened. It is a milestone event in a lot of our lives.
Overall, I love the way this story was told. How it was told through the memories of Jamie, the MC. Living her frustration because it isn’t going fast enough or because she wants to know what happens next. But the doctors have to treat her brain like a book, going through each chapter one at a time and only moving on when ready.
This audiobook is narrated by Quinn Riley. I will never have anything bad to say about Quinn or her narration. She puts so much emotion into her voice acting.
🎧 Car Accident
🎧 Long Distance Relationship
🎧 September 11th
🎧 Memory Loss / Amnesia
🎧 Grief
🎧 Second Chance Romance
🎧 Past & Present Timelines
🎧 Sapphic Romance
🎧 1990s Nostalgia
Jamie Kessler was in a car accident and the memories from most of her life have been lost to amnesia. She agrees to go under an experimental procedure to get those memories back. What she didn’t bargain for was reliving the trials and tribulations of her amnesia induced forgotten love of Mallory Ziegler. Someone who seems close, yet, so far away. This procedure isn’t a guaranteed success. Will Jamie get her memories back?
I received this audiobook from NetGalley and the author in return for my honest review. For me, one of the things I loved about this book was the nostalgia. A large part of this book takes place during the beginning of the internet and AOL chatrooms and having to yell at someone to get off the phone to use the internet or vice versa. There is one thing I have to say that is unrealistic about this book (and I mean unrealistic as a joke) that there is no mention of calling cards or collect calls. Jamie and Mallory live on opposite ends of the United States and do a lot of talking over the phone, landline phones. They would have racked up some bills talking to each other.
This audiobook does cover the time period of September 11th. A couple chapters of the book are dedicated to this time period so this is a trigger warning. I appreciate how the author puts a character in the midst of NYC when this terror occurs and you can really get a sense of the feelings someone may have been going through that day. Those of older generations won’t forget that day or where they were when it happened. It is a milestone event in a lot of our lives.
Overall, I love the way this story was told. How it was told through the memories of Jamie, the MC. Living her frustration because it isn’t going fast enough or because she wants to know what happens next. But the doctors have to treat her brain like a book, going through each chapter one at a time and only moving on when ready.
This audiobook is narrated by Quinn Riley. I will never have anything bad to say about Quinn or her narration. She puts so much emotion into her voice acting.
🎧 Car Accident
🎧 Long Distance Relationship
🎧 September 11th
🎧 Memory Loss / Amnesia
🎧 Grief
🎧 Second Chance Romance
🎧 Past & Present Timelines
🎧 Sapphic Romance
🎧 1990s Nostalgia
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Wow! Morgan Lee Miller take a bow! The Rewind Effect is so good! I was utterly spellbound by a narrative structure that is as inventive as it is poignant. The story utilizes a clever and effective framing device involving an experimental medical procedure designed to help Jamie Kessler retrieve memories lost after a devastating car accident. This memory retrieval process serves as a brilliant framing mechanism, allowing the narrative to seamlessly weave back and forth through time while neatly embedding important cultural touchstones (like connecting in early AOL chatrooms, the tragedy of 9/11, for example) that ground the characters’ formative years in an authentic, nostalgic era.
Beyond the inventive premise, what captured my heart was the breathtaking emotional pull of the relationship between Jamie and Mallory. Their connection feels profoundly visceral, raw, and entirely consuming. As Jamie slowly pieces together the fragments of her past, the longing, vulnerability, and enduring love she feels for Mallory anchor the entire novel. The author captures the ache of second-chance romance with stunning precision, making every revelation feel earned and moving. I experienced Jamie’s desperation to reclaim her lost history right alongside her, feeling every shred of her heartache, hope, and eventual healing.
The chemistry between them leaps off the page, charged with a tender intensity. This is a masterclass in romance storytelling—romantic and sexy in precisely the right ways, yet grounded by genuine emotional depth and the terrifying reality of what it means to lose and rediscover love. Morgan Lee Miller has crafted a treasure-filled read. This is right up there with the very best deeply felt, beautifully written LGBTQ+ romance.
I was lucky enough to grab both the text and the audio version of this, and the novel works just well either way. Quin Riley captures the essence of Jamie superbly and narrates with verve and bounce. She’s also one of the very best when it comes to physical scenes.
Thank you to the author and publisher the amazing Bold Strokes Books, and to NetGalley for the opportunity of going back in time and sharing Jamie’s life-shaping years.
Beyond the inventive premise, what captured my heart was the breathtaking emotional pull of the relationship between Jamie and Mallory. Their connection feels profoundly visceral, raw, and entirely consuming. As Jamie slowly pieces together the fragments of her past, the longing, vulnerability, and enduring love she feels for Mallory anchor the entire novel. The author captures the ache of second-chance romance with stunning precision, making every revelation feel earned and moving. I experienced Jamie’s desperation to reclaim her lost history right alongside her, feeling every shred of her heartache, hope, and eventual healing.
The chemistry between them leaps off the page, charged with a tender intensity. This is a masterclass in romance storytelling—romantic and sexy in precisely the right ways, yet grounded by genuine emotional depth and the terrifying reality of what it means to lose and rediscover love. Morgan Lee Miller has crafted a treasure-filled read. This is right up there with the very best deeply felt, beautifully written LGBTQ+ romance.
I was lucky enough to grab both the text and the audio version of this, and the novel works just well either way. Quin Riley captures the essence of Jamie superbly and narrates with verve and bounce. She’s also one of the very best when it comes to physical scenes.
Thank you to the author and publisher the amazing Bold Strokes Books, and to NetGalley for the opportunity of going back in time and sharing Jamie’s life-shaping years.
Review of advance copy
Similar to The Memories of Marlie Rose, this is a story that revolves around memories. This time, instead of erasing memories, Jamie has lost her memories and the experimental procedure helps restore them, from oldest to most recent. And… the majority of those memories turn out to revolve around Mallory. Who, in the present, Jamie doesn’t know much about, except it’s Jamie’s sister with her not Mallory, and Jamie is not wearing a ring. So, whatever happened, it’s over. Except, her memories are a little inconsistent on this… it’s there, and then it’s over, and then it’s back, and then… well, they could never walk away from each other, but apparently they also had trouble sticking the landing? Leading to… what?
I suppose this is a second chance in concept, because maybe Jamie can track down Mallory and make it work this time? Except, unlike the typical second chance, the present isn’t really heavily featured, until very very late. It’s more just a story of Jamie and Mallory’s long and winding path, from college into their 40s, revealed over the course of the memory restoration process. And the thing is, that was a lovely story. There was a ton of 90s-2000s nostalgia, which I appreciated in principle, but it wasn’t the food and drinks (or, hilariously, the labeling) that stuck with me, but the music. So, it was great for me that Jamie also drove the progress of the story via the music of the day!
All in all, I’m not really filing this under second chance, but under “great story” and “unique and wonderful use of memory reveals.” It’s a safe bet my next D&D game will feature crucial memories stashed all over the place for the party to track down and unveil… 😁
I suppose this is a second chance in concept, because maybe Jamie can track down Mallory and make it work this time? Except, unlike the typical second chance, the present isn’t really heavily featured, until very very late. It’s more just a story of Jamie and Mallory’s long and winding path, from college into their 40s, revealed over the course of the memory restoration process. And the thing is, that was a lovely story. There was a ton of 90s-2000s nostalgia, which I appreciated in principle, but it wasn’t the food and drinks (or, hilariously, the labeling) that stuck with me, but the music. So, it was great for me that Jamie also drove the progress of the story via the music of the day!
All in all, I’m not really filing this under second chance, but under “great story” and “unique and wonderful use of memory reveals.” It’s a safe bet my next D&D game will feature crucial memories stashed all over the place for the party to track down and unveil… 😁
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I have read this writer before with a vaguely similar subject but not remotely similar plot. I ugly cried at parts of that novel and adored it..... I also recently read a similar subject but light version very recently..... like busses..... you wait ages for one memory loss book......
Great first chapter. The first part naturally has a back and forth timeline. I am assuming that the past relationship we are learning so much about is integral to the present. Therefore I am very interested in what happened and what will happen.
At about 30%, a plot point I was meant to notice, but felt smart about noticing, comes to the front.
At around 40% there is another plot point, from real events that feels very authentic and almost unimaginable although it happened in my lifetime. That is a very well written section…… as is everything so far.
This book, certainly in the first half has a back and forth timeline. I don’t hate it….( as the young things say!) In other books I often find the back story irritating because it tends to be in large parts, all wonderful but we know it doesn’t last, so I am often impatient to get to the present sections, to see things work out. With this book, the past sections are revealing what happened and I don’t know what happened and I don’t know what is going to happen in the present apart from the genre which is romance. Good books mean the how and why are more important to me than the result, seeing the workings is more important than the answer! Thirteen chapters in and I can honestly say the workings are working for me.
What didn't work so well for me was two of the intimate scenes at around 65%. Some of the word choices pulled me out. Absolutely personal taste.
My taste was every other part of this novel. I didn’t ugly cry, but so many parts I felt!
Great first chapter. The first part naturally has a back and forth timeline. I am assuming that the past relationship we are learning so much about is integral to the present. Therefore I am very interested in what happened and what will happen.
At about 30%, a plot point I was meant to notice, but felt smart about noticing, comes to the front.
At around 40% there is another plot point, from real events that feels very authentic and almost unimaginable although it happened in my lifetime. That is a very well written section…… as is everything so far.
This book, certainly in the first half has a back and forth timeline. I don’t hate it….( as the young things say!) In other books I often find the back story irritating because it tends to be in large parts, all wonderful but we know it doesn’t last, so I am often impatient to get to the present sections, to see things work out. With this book, the past sections are revealing what happened and I don’t know what happened and I don’t know what is going to happen in the present apart from the genre which is romance. Good books mean the how and why are more important to me than the result, seeing the workings is more important than the answer! Thirteen chapters in and I can honestly say the workings are working for me.
What didn't work so well for me was two of the intimate scenes at around 65%. Some of the word choices pulled me out. Absolutely personal taste.
My taste was every other part of this novel. I didn’t ugly cry, but so many parts I felt!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This sapphic romance is so emotionally rich and meaningful.
Jamie’s memory was effectively wiped after a car accident, and she has no recollection of the past 20 years of her life, and how she ended up in California. This book unravels as Jamie goes through a breakthrough treatment at a neurology facility to recover her memories. Each treatment bridging the gap from college to present day memory by memory. All the while something feels as though it’s weighing on her heart.
Jamie is confronted with memories of her first love, a girl she met in an AOL chatroom in the 90s, Mallory, and starts reliving their love story as she recovers her memory. SWOON. Memories/amnesia and nonlinear timelines are some of my most favorite plot devices. This sets you up for a fast paced read that makes you unable to put this story down.
The characters are thoughtfully developed and layered making you super invested in them through the story. As they navigate difficult times the timeline and relationships feel real and beautiful. As we walk down memory lane we see some significant moments in history, like 911, and the legalization of gay marriage, through the lens of our characters as well. The entire book brings in nostalgic feelings and makes it easy for all readers to connect. The romance is sweet and emotionally rich while also having plenty of steamy spicy scenes to balance the emotional depth. I cried no less than 7 times reading this book and that to mean says it all. I LOVED the epilogue <3
Audio notes: a beautiful performance by Quinn Riley. I loved the range of emotions portrayed through the performance and the distinction between the characters tone and inflictions that felt wholly “Them”
Jamie’s memory was effectively wiped after a car accident, and she has no recollection of the past 20 years of her life, and how she ended up in California. This book unravels as Jamie goes through a breakthrough treatment at a neurology facility to recover her memories. Each treatment bridging the gap from college to present day memory by memory. All the while something feels as though it’s weighing on her heart.
Jamie is confronted with memories of her first love, a girl she met in an AOL chatroom in the 90s, Mallory, and starts reliving their love story as she recovers her memory. SWOON. Memories/amnesia and nonlinear timelines are some of my most favorite plot devices. This sets you up for a fast paced read that makes you unable to put this story down.
The characters are thoughtfully developed and layered making you super invested in them through the story. As they navigate difficult times the timeline and relationships feel real and beautiful. As we walk down memory lane we see some significant moments in history, like 911, and the legalization of gay marriage, through the lens of our characters as well. The entire book brings in nostalgic feelings and makes it easy for all readers to connect. The romance is sweet and emotionally rich while also having plenty of steamy spicy scenes to balance the emotional depth. I cried no less than 7 times reading this book and that to mean says it all. I LOVED the epilogue <3
Audio notes: a beautiful performance by Quinn Riley. I loved the range of emotions portrayed through the performance and the distinction between the characters tone and inflictions that felt wholly “Them”
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
What an excellent ride this was. It was so interesting following Jamie in the present day as she’s undergoing an experimental procedure to recover her lost memories. The detail of using songs to connect her to the past was a nice touch. I loved seeing her recover her memories of the 90s and 2000s and Mallory, the woman she fell in love with. I was so invested in uncovering the path of their romance and why they weren’t together anymore. This was the type of second chance romance that I can really get behind. Because you get to see the initial romance instead of just being plopped into the story later on and only hearing tiny bits of information of what happened before.
I loved seeing all the details in the past, like Jamie and Mallory meeting in an AOL chatroom and bonding over their love of Claire Danes, Jamie’s obsession with the drink Fruitopia, listening to Melissa Etheridge while sitting on the roof, counting down to the year 2000. It was so great seeing how Jamie and Mallory’s friendship and romance grew and changed over the years. Their conflicts made sense and never felt like they were just thrown in so that there could be drama for the sake of the narrative’s arc.
I definitely recommend this book for people looking for a compelling lesbian romance that spans decades. It’s full of love, sex, music, friendship, tragedy, and reconciliation. I listened to this on audio and the narrator Quinn Riley did an excellent job at bringing the characters to life. I was annoyed whenever I had to pause the book to do something else. I was always dying to get back to the characters so I could discover their romance as Jamie was recovering her memories.
Thank you to the publisher for providing an advance copy via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
I loved seeing all the details in the past, like Jamie and Mallory meeting in an AOL chatroom and bonding over their love of Claire Danes, Jamie’s obsession with the drink Fruitopia, listening to Melissa Etheridge while sitting on the roof, counting down to the year 2000. It was so great seeing how Jamie and Mallory’s friendship and romance grew and changed over the years. Their conflicts made sense and never felt like they were just thrown in so that there could be drama for the sake of the narrative’s arc.
I definitely recommend this book for people looking for a compelling lesbian romance that spans decades. It’s full of love, sex, music, friendship, tragedy, and reconciliation. I listened to this on audio and the narrator Quinn Riley did an excellent job at bringing the characters to life. I was annoyed whenever I had to pause the book to do something else. I was always dying to get back to the characters so I could discover their romance as Jamie was recovering her memories.
Thank you to the publisher for providing an advance copy via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to Bold Strokes and Netgalley for the advanced copy.
I am not usually a romance reader, but this one was appealing, with an added somewhat sci-fi element. The book focuses on the rapid coming of age of Jamie, the protagonist, through the restoration of her memories, with a focus on her most significant relationship.
The first half of the book was very nostalgic and authentic to the era. The budding romance between the two main characters was adorable, yet realistic. The author truly captured the experience of growing up queer in the 90s, highlighting the technological changes and major impacts felt by the generation who navigated them. The story illustrates how the ability to connect with queer people online was significant to building new communities, yet the distance between these new connections was also a novel challenge.
However successful the first half of the book, the second felt a bit more one-note and rushed. As a romance, I am not surprised that the relationship was of primary concern for Jamie. Still, it seemed, despite the total amnesia that Jamie faces, all of her memories seem to only be about Mallory, perhaps obsessively, and very little focus is given to the other elements in 25 years of her life, such as the impressive career she established, important moments with friends or family, or global events.
Despite the back half of the novel being a little less dynamic, it is still definitely worth a read by sapphic romance fans. Overall, this is a cute and satisfying lesbian romance. It hits many great notes on being queer in the emerging internet era and examines the impacts of expanding boundaries in queer connections through an overarching romantic plot.
I am not usually a romance reader, but this one was appealing, with an added somewhat sci-fi element. The book focuses on the rapid coming of age of Jamie, the protagonist, through the restoration of her memories, with a focus on her most significant relationship.
The first half of the book was very nostalgic and authentic to the era. The budding romance between the two main characters was adorable, yet realistic. The author truly captured the experience of growing up queer in the 90s, highlighting the technological changes and major impacts felt by the generation who navigated them. The story illustrates how the ability to connect with queer people online was significant to building new communities, yet the distance between these new connections was also a novel challenge.
However successful the first half of the book, the second felt a bit more one-note and rushed. As a romance, I am not surprised that the relationship was of primary concern for Jamie. Still, it seemed, despite the total amnesia that Jamie faces, all of her memories seem to only be about Mallory, perhaps obsessively, and very little focus is given to the other elements in 25 years of her life, such as the impressive career she established, important moments with friends or family, or global events.
Despite the back half of the novel being a little less dynamic, it is still definitely worth a read by sapphic romance fans. Overall, this is a cute and satisfying lesbian romance. It hits many great notes on being queer in the emerging internet era and examines the impacts of expanding boundaries in queer connections through an overarching romantic plot.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I absolutely loved this book. It's a beautiful story about mid-forties Jamie, who suffers memory loss after a car accident, and Mallory, who was Jamie's first love and is in the forefront of almost every story as Jamie slowly starts to recall her past. Jamie's memory recovery begins as she she starts college in the late 90s and she meets Mallory in an AOL chat room. The book continues to chronologically document their lives as Jamie remembers things pieces at a time.
I will say - part of my absolute love for this book has to be because I am 46 and I came out in 90s too. There is so much about this book I relate to, as I remember the events happening so clearly, and I was the same age as the MCs. The reference to Ellen's coming out episode, Melissa Etheridge's "Yes I Am" album, Don't Ask Don't Tell, etc. This entire book wasn't just a great story, it was also a journey through my formative years. The music references alone made me feel like the author was along for every ride in my 1992 Geo Tracker with its after-market 6 disc CD changer. That said, I don't think you have to have been born in 1980 to love this book, it could stand on it's own regardless of your age.
This was a well-paced, easy read/listen. Both MCs were likable. The side characters were perfect. The spice was excellently done as well. I will definitely be checking out more of Morgan Lee Miller's work, as she was new to me. I was thrilled to see this wasn't her debut!
The book was narrated by Quinn Riley. She killed it, as usual. Love her work.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ALC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.
I will say - part of my absolute love for this book has to be because I am 46 and I came out in 90s too. There is so much about this book I relate to, as I remember the events happening so clearly, and I was the same age as the MCs. The reference to Ellen's coming out episode, Melissa Etheridge's "Yes I Am" album, Don't Ask Don't Tell, etc. This entire book wasn't just a great story, it was also a journey through my formative years. The music references alone made me feel like the author was along for every ride in my 1992 Geo Tracker with its after-market 6 disc CD changer. That said, I don't think you have to have been born in 1980 to love this book, it could stand on it's own regardless of your age.
This was a well-paced, easy read/listen. Both MCs were likable. The side characters were perfect. The spice was excellently done as well. I will definitely be checking out more of Morgan Lee Miller's work, as she was new to me. I was thrilled to see this wasn't her debut!
The book was narrated by Quinn Riley. She killed it, as usual. Love her work.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ALC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The Rewind Effect is a beautifully constructed second-chance romance that balances nostalgia, heartbreak, and hope with remarkable skill.
I wasn't sure how I'd feel about the back-and-forth timeline at first, but it ended up being one of the book's greatest strengths. Watching Jaime and Mallory's relationship unfold piece by piece allowed every new revelation to deepen my understanding of them, and I found myself completely invested in their story. Rather than interrupting the momentum, the shifting timelines steadily built emotional tension and made me eager to uncover the next chapter of their shared history.
The nostalgia was another highlight. The references to music from the '90s and early 2000s felt wonderfully authentic, and I loved listening along to many of the songs as Jaime revisited them. They became more than a soundtrack—they were woven into the emotional fabric of the story.
What ultimately made this book stand out was the romance itself. Jaime and Mallory's relationship felt like a lifelong journey, full of joy, mistakes, missed opportunities, and enduring love. Their emotional growth, both individually and together, made the ending feel deeply satisfying and beautifully earned.
This is a thoughtful, heartfelt romance that understands the power of memory, timing, and choosing each other—even after life has taken unexpected turns.
Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
I wasn't sure how I'd feel about the back-and-forth timeline at first, but it ended up being one of the book's greatest strengths. Watching Jaime and Mallory's relationship unfold piece by piece allowed every new revelation to deepen my understanding of them, and I found myself completely invested in their story. Rather than interrupting the momentum, the shifting timelines steadily built emotional tension and made me eager to uncover the next chapter of their shared history.
The nostalgia was another highlight. The references to music from the '90s and early 2000s felt wonderfully authentic, and I loved listening along to many of the songs as Jaime revisited them. They became more than a soundtrack—they were woven into the emotional fabric of the story.
What ultimately made this book stand out was the romance itself. Jaime and Mallory's relationship felt like a lifelong journey, full of joy, mistakes, missed opportunities, and enduring love. Their emotional growth, both individually and together, made the ending feel deeply satisfying and beautifully earned.
This is a thoughtful, heartfelt romance that understands the power of memory, timing, and choosing each other—even after life has taken unexpected turns.
Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This book pulled me in more than I expected. I recently read another novel about memory loss after an accident, but this story stands completely on its own. At times I felt like I was living Jamie's confusion myself — trying to piece together "what happened," except in my case, imagining not remembering anything before turning nineteen. The way the story moves between the early AOL chatroom days and the present gives it a wonderful sense of time passing, and it made me reflect on what you want from love and relationships when you're young versus what you want later in life.
What really stayed with me were the questions underneath the plot: what choices did Jamie make, how do we relive our past when given the chance, and what would we do differently if we could? The book has a touch of speculative fantasy with its memory-recovery technique, and it left me genuinely wishing something like it could exist in real life — especially for conditions like dementia, where recovering lost memories would mean so much. That little spark of "what if this were real" made the story even more special to me. It's not a book full of dramatic twists or fast-paced adventure, but that's exactly its charm — it's quiet, warm, and deeply feel-good, the kind of story that stays with you rather than rushes past you.
This is the perfect book for a lazy sunny afternoon — easy to sink into, emotionally rich, and ultimately hopeful about second chances. I'm giving it 4.5 stars. I voluntarily wrote this review after receiving a free copy of the book.
August 17, 2026
**Special thank you to the publisher for providing me a copy of this for an honest review via Netgalley!**
You know when you read a book and you just know it's gonna stick with you for a while? That's the experience I had listening to The Rewind Effect. (No, seriously, I finished it last week and am STILL thinking about it.)
This story follows Jamie, who recently had a car accident. She goes to receive a procedure that allows her to relive her past memories using music. This obviously means she'll also relive some of her past romances, including one with Mallory. It's a super interesting concept!
I really, really enjoyed this book. I'm a HUGE fan of romances that aren't just a happy story from page one, where you can tell that something happened and two people get pushed away and pulled back together multiple times over years of their lives. It feels a lot more realistic to me. Not quite sure what that says about me, but it's true, and that's exactly what I got in The Rewind Effect between Jamie and Mal.
I really liked about this book was that it wasn't super "happy" the whole time. I don't fully dislike those "happy romances" but I do appreciate when a book actually talks about real world trauma and events, and The Rewind Effect did a great job with that. There were quite a few moments when I was even more immersed because I knew what was coming before it happened.
The flashbacks were extremely well done, I thought they were balanced pretty well with the current timeline.
My only gripe is that there were a few twists that I did see coming, but I don't love basing a romance book's rating on that by any means, because truly if the twists didn't go the way I wanted them to, I think I would've been confused. The twists made perfect sense and made for a much more interesting read.
The narration in the audiobook was great, too. My best friend is obsessed with Quinn Riley as a narrator so I went into this pretty excited and wasn't disappointed.
If you love sapphic second-chance romance books with a twist, stop looking... you've found your next read!
You know when you read a book and you just know it's gonna stick with you for a while? That's the experience I had listening to The Rewind Effect. (No, seriously, I finished it last week and am STILL thinking about it.)
This story follows Jamie, who recently had a car accident. She goes to receive a procedure that allows her to relive her past memories using music. This obviously means she'll also relive some of her past romances, including one with Mallory. It's a super interesting concept!
I really, really enjoyed this book. I'm a HUGE fan of romances that aren't just a happy story from page one, where you can tell that something happened and two people get pushed away and pulled back together multiple times over years of their lives. It feels a lot more realistic to me. Not quite sure what that says about me, but it's true, and that's exactly what I got in The Rewind Effect between Jamie and Mal.
I really liked about this book was that it wasn't super "happy" the whole time. I don't fully dislike those "happy romances" but I do appreciate when a book actually talks about real world trauma and events, and The Rewind Effect did a great job with that. There were quite a few moments when I was even more immersed because I knew what was coming before it happened.
The flashbacks were extremely well done, I thought they were balanced pretty well with the current timeline.
My only gripe is that there were a few twists that I did see coming, but I don't love basing a romance book's rating on that by any means, because truly if the twists didn't go the way I wanted them to, I think I would've been confused. The twists made perfect sense and made for a much more interesting read.
The narration in the audiobook was great, too. My best friend is obsessed with Quinn Riley as a narrator so I went into this pretty excited and wasn't disappointed.
If you love sapphic second-chance romance books with a twist, stop looking... you've found your next read!
August 14, 2026
Thank you to RBmedia and Bold Stroke Books for an eARC and audiobook ARC.
DNF at 21%
I knew there would be two timelines in this book - the current where the mc is trying to remember and then the past as she remembers. What I really didn’t expect was for the mc to be in her 40s in the current timeline. That definitely through me at the start.
Based on the cover, I figured the ‘past’ timeline would be a teen romance and then the ‘current’ timeline would be later, like 20s or even early 30s. I did not expect the ‘current’ to be in their 40s and the ‘past’ to be in their early 20s. The cover really gives YA vibes and they look young!
But once I got past that, it wasn’t so bad. Until it was just a lot of chat room texts. Which again, I expected some as the description says that they meet on AOL chat rooms but gosh it was so annoying to just listen to the back and forth of screen names being read aloud constantly for pages. So I went to the physical eARC instead of the audio, hoping that would make it better to read. It didn’t really.
I think that this book just isn’t for me unfortunately. I tried to give it a decent chance but by the time I got to 21% I just really wasn’t interested and honestly couldn’t care less about any of the characters. I hadn’t formed any kind of connection (in either timeline) with anyone, still knew practically nothing about the characters, and just wasn’t invested in the romance or the mc getting her memories back at all. Which is a shame.
A good premise I think, just not for me sadly.
DNF at 21%
I knew there would be two timelines in this book - the current where the mc is trying to remember and then the past as she remembers. What I really didn’t expect was for the mc to be in her 40s in the current timeline. That definitely through me at the start.
Based on the cover, I figured the ‘past’ timeline would be a teen romance and then the ‘current’ timeline would be later, like 20s or even early 30s. I did not expect the ‘current’ to be in their 40s and the ‘past’ to be in their early 20s. The cover really gives YA vibes and they look young!
But once I got past that, it wasn’t so bad. Until it was just a lot of chat room texts. Which again, I expected some as the description says that they meet on AOL chat rooms but gosh it was so annoying to just listen to the back and forth of screen names being read aloud constantly for pages. So I went to the physical eARC instead of the audio, hoping that would make it better to read. It didn’t really.
I think that this book just isn’t for me unfortunately. I tried to give it a decent chance but by the time I got to 21% I just really wasn’t interested and honestly couldn’t care less about any of the characters. I hadn’t formed any kind of connection (in either timeline) with anyone, still knew practically nothing about the characters, and just wasn’t invested in the romance or the mc getting her memories back at all. Which is a shame.
A good premise I think, just not for me sadly.
August 21, 2026
Thank you to NetGalley and Bold Strokes Books Inc. for providing me with an ALC and ARC in exchange for an honest review.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆ (4/5 Stars)
First of all, this book has a lovely cover. I absolutely love it, and it was one of the first things that caught my attention.I had both the ARC and ALC of The Rewind Effect given to me, so I got to experience this story in both formats.
I ended up listening to the audiobook as well as reading it, and I enjoyed having both options.
The full immersion into the story was really nice and relaxing. Listening to the ALC was wonderful; the narrator had a lovely voice that suited the style of the story, and her delivery of the characters was given with heart and expression that I could feel through her voice acting.
I really liked the idea behind this story and found myself wanting to see where everything was going to go. There were some moments that made me smile and others where I found myself getting more invested in the characters and their situation.
However, there were also moments where I wasn't quite as invested, so my feelings were a bit up and down with this story.
There were a few things that didn't completely work for me, which is why this landed at 4 stars rather than 5, but overall I enjoyed the experience.
I thought it had a very interesting premise.
I'm glad I got the chance to read and listen to The Rewind Effect, and I'm definitely keeping Morgan Lee Miller on my list of authors to look out for.
I would say it's worth the read/listen.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆ (4/5 Stars)
First of all, this book has a lovely cover. I absolutely love it, and it was one of the first things that caught my attention.I had both the ARC and ALC of The Rewind Effect given to me, so I got to experience this story in both formats.
I ended up listening to the audiobook as well as reading it, and I enjoyed having both options.
The full immersion into the story was really nice and relaxing. Listening to the ALC was wonderful; the narrator had a lovely voice that suited the style of the story, and her delivery of the characters was given with heart and expression that I could feel through her voice acting.
I really liked the idea behind this story and found myself wanting to see where everything was going to go. There were some moments that made me smile and others where I found myself getting more invested in the characters and their situation.
However, there were also moments where I wasn't quite as invested, so my feelings were a bit up and down with this story.
There were a few things that didn't completely work for me, which is why this landed at 4 stars rather than 5, but overall I enjoyed the experience.
I thought it had a very interesting premise.
I'm glad I got the chance to read and listen to The Rewind Effect, and I'm definitely keeping Morgan Lee Miller on my list of authors to look out for.
I would say it's worth the read/listen.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
When I picked up this romance, I expected more than what I got. To read two people stuck in a situationship only to keep breaking up and getting back together was exhausting. I despised the main character and there was never any good conclusion to her insecurities because the moment the external factor causing them was removed, things returned to "normal" until it happened again.
I cringed reading through Jamie's POV with how immature she acts (sounding nearly the same at 19 and 45). I also wasn't convinced by their chemistry because it kept reading like infatuation and limerence first before any genuine romance.
There's also some doctor-patient relationship ethical concerns towards the end when Jamie finds out more about herself, and it broke my immersion with it being spun as a way to bolster the romance's tragedy. The real tragedy was in these two people being unable to let go of each other to an obsessive degree.
It wasn't for me, as much as I wanted to be. While I normally like messier romances, there wasn't enough strength in the relationship that made me want to root for them. It kept harping on how electric it was but mainly described scenes with physical intimacy or huge explosive conflicts. I couldn't get a grip on what they were like together aside from this "picturesque" couple Jamie kept describing them as. By the end, I felt frustrated and disillusioned with the couple.
I cringed reading through Jamie's POV with how immature she acts (sounding nearly the same at 19 and 45). I also wasn't convinced by their chemistry because it kept reading like infatuation and limerence first before any genuine romance.
There's also some doctor-patient relationship ethical concerns towards the end when Jamie finds out more about herself, and it broke my immersion with it being spun as a way to bolster the romance's tragedy. The real tragedy was in these two people being unable to let go of each other to an obsessive degree.
It wasn't for me, as much as I wanted to be. While I normally like messier romances, there wasn't enough strength in the relationship that made me want to root for them. It kept harping on how electric it was but mainly described scenes with physical intimacy or huge explosive conflicts. I couldn't get a grip on what they were like together aside from this "picturesque" couple Jamie kept describing them as. By the end, I felt frustrated and disillusioned with the couple.
August 15, 2026
The Rewind Effect is a mix of speculative fiction and a second-chance romance, told in two separate timelines. Jamie and Mallory met online in the 90s in their late teens and developed a friendship and long-distance relationship, and we get to learn about this via memories. This is complemented by present day events where Jamie has experienced an unknown trauma that has caused amnesia, and she is undergoing a procedure that helps her gain back aforementioned memories.
I experienced so much nostalgia while Jamie relives memories she has lost: meeting people online in AOL chatrooms and then communicating via email and AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), going to rent movies at Blockbuster, and listening to songs from the 90s. It was wonderful to be able to relate to these pieces of this book and made me love it even more.
I liked the pacing and timeline of the story, and that as a reader I was experiencing all of the emotions with Jamie as memories and current events were described. It did not feel too long or too short either.
The audiobook narration also helped to immerse me in the story. Quinn Riley was able to convey Jamie and Mallory's dialogue, experiences, and emotions so clearly. I could easily tell who was speaking as well.
I HIGHLY recommend this book. I am definitely going to add it to my list of books to buy in the future. Thank you to RBMedia and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to this ALC in exchange for my review.
I experienced so much nostalgia while Jamie relives memories she has lost: meeting people online in AOL chatrooms and then communicating via email and AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), going to rent movies at Blockbuster, and listening to songs from the 90s. It was wonderful to be able to relate to these pieces of this book and made me love it even more.
I liked the pacing and timeline of the story, and that as a reader I was experiencing all of the emotions with Jamie as memories and current events were described. It did not feel too long or too short either.
The audiobook narration also helped to immerse me in the story. Quinn Riley was able to convey Jamie and Mallory's dialogue, experiences, and emotions so clearly. I could easily tell who was speaking as well.
I HIGHLY recommend this book. I am definitely going to add it to my list of books to buy in the future. Thank you to RBMedia and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to this ALC in exchange for my review.
August 23, 2026
🎧 3.5⭐
📖 4⭐
2.5 🌶️
The Rewind Effect contains the following topics/tropes:
-Sapphic Romance
-Friends to Lovers
-Second Chance
-Grief
-Memory Loss
-Dual timeline
The Rewind Effect was a story about Jamie who was struggling to get back the memories that she have lost from an accident. Her sister have brought her to a specialist to try out a new procedure that was developed specifically for people who lost or have been missing their memories. It was such a journey for both Jamie and us readers as she brings us along on how she navigates her memories, her past-- it brings nostalgia as most of her memories were from 1990s in the early 2000s and the author did a great job describing everything which made it very immersive. It was a rollercoaster of emotions while Jamie experiences all of these as if she was feeling it all for first the first time.
I would love to recommend this to people who loves navigating their own feelings and rediscovering their selves but one must keep in mind the trigger warnings.
I rated the audiobook 3.5 because early in the book I found it hard to distinguish which characters are which and some parts like the AOL chats might have been written with some illustrations, I found them harder to understand because I purely finished this through audiobook. Other than that I enjoyed listening to it, the narrator was not a lazy talker too.
Thank you Netgalley and Tantor Media for this ALC!
📖 4⭐
2.5 🌶️
The Rewind Effect contains the following topics/tropes:
-Sapphic Romance
-Friends to Lovers
-Second Chance
-Grief
-Memory Loss
-Dual timeline
The Rewind Effect was a story about Jamie who was struggling to get back the memories that she have lost from an accident. Her sister have brought her to a specialist to try out a new procedure that was developed specifically for people who lost or have been missing their memories. It was such a journey for both Jamie and us readers as she brings us along on how she navigates her memories, her past-- it brings nostalgia as most of her memories were from 1990s in the early 2000s and the author did a great job describing everything which made it very immersive. It was a rollercoaster of emotions while Jamie experiences all of these as if she was feeling it all for first the first time.
I would love to recommend this to people who loves navigating their own feelings and rediscovering their selves but one must keep in mind the trigger warnings.
I rated the audiobook 3.5 because early in the book I found it hard to distinguish which characters are which and some parts like the AOL chats might have been written with some illustrations, I found them harder to understand because I purely finished this through audiobook. Other than that I enjoyed listening to it, the narrator was not a lazy talker too.
Thank you Netgalley and Tantor Media for this ALC!
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