This Book Can Change You - Musings on “Every Version of You” by Natalie Messier. Published July 2026.
“Where did it all start going wrong?”
Is your life bleak and filled with regret? What if, after you die, you wake up in a 70s-style office with ugly carpeting, where a caseworker offers you a second chance at life? You can go back to any point in your life and try again, with all your memories intact. There’s just one rule: if you reveal the truth to anyone, you—and every memory of you in that timeline—will cease to exist.
Every Version of You By Natalie Messier
Contemporary Romance, Magical Realism
Publication Date July 2026
Josephina “Joey” Vazquez, a 32-year-old corporate lawyer who’s closest companion is her helion cat Ruthie, chooses to return to the moment she met her best friend, Ellie. The man she was in love with for the past 14 years. More importantly, she wants to return to the time before he met his future wife, Cat. She quickly succeeds in changing their origin story, but discovers that creating the love story she came back for isn’t nearly as straightforward as she’d hoped. Besides trying to rewrite her own life, she attempts to steer her friends’ lives, hoping to spare them the heartbreak and tragedies she knows are coming.
And then there’s Alex Aquino. Tech scion, old classmate, and one-night mistake from her previous life. He keeps showing up—and she decides to welcome the distraction, because why not? He’s different from the man she remembers. Unexpectedly endearing, he’s nothing like the antagonist she once knew. Over the course of the novel, Joey struggles to reconcile the boy standing in front of her with the man she knows he’ll eventually become. How can she trust who he is now when she already knows who he’ll be?
I loved the slow-burn romance, but what I appreciated even more were the questions this story raised.
I am drawn to time-travel and parallel-universe stories; add in romance, and that book becomes my instant next read. But what fascinates me most about them is what remains consistent across every timeline.
“What is fated? What happens only because of our choices, our actions, or simply our timing? What if I had acted? What if I hadn’t?”
Personally, I’ve always believed that if something doesn’t happen or work out, it simply wasn’t meant for me. Either something better is coming, or I’m being protected from something worse. This belief has helped me find peace with things that don’t go according to plan. It has also helped me set expectations with every plan. And that’s part of what made Joey’s story so compelling. Her first life wasn’t bleak simply because of the things that happened to her. It was bleak because she wasn’t really living for herself. She wasn’t passionate. She wasn’t confident. She wasn’t fulfilled. Time and time again, she allowed her head to talk her out of what her heart wanted. She made decisions based on what was expected of her rather than what would make her happy. And somewhere along the way, she became a spectator in her own life.
In her second life, Joey makes a conscious effort to be different. She decides to be more headstrong, assertive, and adventurous than she was at 18. She knows with certainty that the path she originally chose didn’t make her happy, so now she’s willing to explore possibilities she would have previously dismissed. She has time, she has options, and now she’s willing to live with the discomfort of her family’s disappointment.
This was more than a love story, even for Joe. Through her new connections and new decisions, she started to love the person she was becoming. Fear and insecurity stopped dictating all her choices. To me, this story is a cautionary tale about the consequences of not being honest, not allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, living according to others’ expectations, falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy, and constantly pouring into others without ever filling our own cup. When Joey decides to do something drastically different than in her first life, she sees that sometimes she was horribly wrong about how others saw her or how she gauged others.
Time and again she would muse how she thought she knew them, but then some hidden depth revealed itself. After one admission, she was shocked to hear that the person had an unfulfilled dream, but then, of course he did, doesn’t everyone? Did she live her first life in a manner that ignored any unfulfilled dreams she had based on the assumption that everyone did that to some extent so she should just suck it up and continue down the path she had set herself on? This sunk path fallacy followed her to the end of her short first life.
It also beautifully illustrated how little we truly know about what other people are thinking. We make assumptions about their feelings, motivations, and intentions, then act on those assumptions as though they’re facts. Sometimes, those assumptions become the very things that strain or destroy our relationships. One conversation can change the entire trajectory of our lives. By not asking, by not believing in ourselves, we can talk ourselves out of happiness before we’ve even given it a chance. And perhaps that’s what resonated with me most. How much of our unhappiness comes from the things that happen to us, and how much comes from the stories we tell ourselves about those things?
Joey’s journey also made me think about the difference between accepting what isn’t meant for us and being too afraid to pursue what we want. We can take risks, make our feelings known, and pursue something wholeheartedly while still accepting that the outcome might not be what we’d hoped for. We can find happiness in the journey, even when it doesn’t lead us where we expected. That’s very different from allowing fear of rejection or failure to prevent us from trying at all. Personally, I wouldn’t go back to the past. Not with the life I have now. I believe the choices I made were the best ones I could make with the knowledge, circumstances, and options I had at the time. But I can understand why someone who doesn’t share that belief might be tempted to change the past if given the chance. The thing is, we don’t necessarily need a second life to change the direction of this one.
“We make small choices every day, and those choices accumulate over time. They can gradually bring us closer to the life we want, or take us further and further away when we allow fear, insecurity, and self-doubt to make our decisions for us. Joey thought she needed a different life to be happy, but what she really needed was to give herself permission to live more authentically, with greater courage and faith in herself. ”
I loved reading about Joey and her “messy” second chance love story. There were so many parts that just made me feel warm and happy - I stayed up far too late to find out how it would end. I finished the book and immediately started a re-read. A beautiful debut novel, I can’t wait to see what Natalie Messier puts out next.