The Backtrack

Life, rewound… Nearly twenty years ago, Sam Leto left her small hometown of Tybee Island, Georgia, to get away from the stifling community and pursue her dream of becoming a pilot. She rarely takes vacations, but when her grandmother Pearl decides it’s time to sell the family home, Sam is summoned back to Tybee to pack up the house. The nostalgia hits Sam immediately. Though Tybee is steeped in difficult memories, Sam’s old bedroom is a comforting time capsule from the early 2000s: butterfly clips, drawers of roll-on body glitter and even her favorite CD player with a mixtape from her best friend, Damon Rocha, still inside. Damon was always a safe place and Sam has often thought about how life would be different if she admitted her feelings for him. He still lives in town, but knowing she coldly rejected him as a teenager, Sam wonders why he’d even want to see her again… Mysteriously, the CD player still works all these years later. But it holds more than the memories of her favorite music—the CD player has the power to show Sam an alternate version of her life. Song by song, Sam receives flashbacks from her past—senior prom, graduation, leaving home. But the memories aren’t as she remembers them. They show an alternate past. What could have been. Suddenly, Sam knows exactly how everything would have worked out if she’d taken a chance with Damon—and she can’t help but wonder if she made a terrible mistake leaving Tybee all those years ago. “La Rosa shines at genuinely funny and feminist romantic tales, and I’ll read every single one of them.” —Amy Spalding, bestselling author of For Her Consideration