Reviewed by Priya Mathew for Readers' Favorite

Rachel Morgan is not a woman who dwells. Or that’s what she tells herself. The truth, however, is that she has been circling the same two questions. Why did her first marriage end the way it did, and why did her second feel like trying to hold water in cupped hands? Rachel manages an art gallery on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. She thinks she’s fine. But her version of fine goes straight out of the window when her cousin Kurt hands her a small jar of mysterious compound that sends the body back to 1999 for a few hours at a time. In Kirsty McManus's Tonight I'm Gonna Party, Rachel slips between the present and the late nineties, chasing answers about two very different men. The first, Frankie, her first husband, is a film critic whom she has idolized for two decades. The second, her recent ex-husband, Jarvis, is a television actor whose moodiness and silences slowly hollowed out their marriage. The question the novel quietly asks is one most of us have entertained at least once: what would you do with a few hours in your younger life, knowing everything you know now?

Kirsty McManus has written Tonight I'm Gonna Party in the way of a good conversation. The dual timeline felt natural. Each of Rachel's trips to the nineties has a definite purpose and peels back another layer of the story. The romance was unhurried, and the accompanying mystery was satisfying. As someone who was in high school in 1999, I could recognize the world McManus conjures up in her time travel. The low-grade panic of Y2K that turned out to be nothing, the Backstreet Boys booming out of almost every speaker, and the absolute certainty that our choices back then would define us forever. That last part is more or less what this whole story is about. The romantic tension between Rachel and Jarvis is the emotional core of the novel, and McManus handles it with care. Even though I hadn't read the previous books in the series, I could follow this story easily, though it did leave me curious about the stories of the supporting characters. As someone who came of age in the nineties and has a drawer full of her own what-ifs, I found this book hard to put down.