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"The Repeat Year" Poses Quandary For Protagonist: What to Do Differently?

Every day of every week – almost every hour, maybe – includes a decision that will have an impact on you and the people around you.  So it’s no wonder that we get some of those decisions wrong. 

But of all the wrong decisions you’ve made in the past year, how many of them were so wrong that they’ve changed the course of your life?  And what if you were forced to go back and try again?

Wisconsin writer Andrea Lochen puts Olive, the heroine of her new novel, The Repeat Year, through just that quandary, when Olive wakes up on New Year’s Day and finds that she’s back at the start of 2011.

Olive immediately struggles to figure out what to change.

"This isn’t the type of book that this magical premise and says, ‘She has to save somebody’s life or save the President, or stop an assassination,'" Lochen says. "There’s nothing that grandiose in it.  It’s more the little every day decisions that we make."

The Repeat Year is just published today by Berkley Books. Lochen lives in Wauwatosa – she teaches creative writing at UW-Waukesha, which will host a launch party for the book tonight. She’ll also talk about the book at Boswell Book Company on May 16th.