Second Chances: A Christian Gen-X What-If Novel
What would you do if God gave you the chance to live your life again?
It's 2020, in the middle of the Pandemic, and forty-seven-year-old Nathan Brooks has spent years looking back on the choices that shaped his life. The mistakes, the missed opportunities, and the moments he wishes he could change. Then the impossible happens.
Nathan wakes up in 1987 as his thirteen-year-old self, standing at the beginning of junior high with all his memories of the future intact. Determined to make better choices, Nathan embraces the opportunity to relive his teenage years. But as he reconnects with family, friendships, church life, and first love, he discovers that changing the past is far more complicated than he imagined. Every decision creates new consequences, and the future he remembers begins to slip away.
As the sights and sounds of the late 1980s into the early 1990s surround him once again, Nathan must learn whether a second chance is about rewriting the past or trusting God with the future.
Second Chances is a heartfelt Christian coming-of-age novel filled with faith, family, friendship, romance, and the nostalgia of growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Story Behind This Book
I started writing this shortly before 2020, so it’s taken me a long time to write. Some of this is based on personal experience (write what you know, right?) and my own looking back on choices I’ve made, like on how to deal with a parent who was mentally ill and was untreated. In the novel, his parents also get to fix some mistakes they felt they made, so I used an incident, but definitely fictionalized it a lot, that my mom went through that had an impact on her mentally. I wrote it where what-if she had handled it differently than she had originally, would anything have changed?
