Turnabout

By: Margaret Peterson Haddix, 223 pp.

Amelia and Anny Beth meet in a place that is doing what is called Project Turnabout. Both women are over 100 years old and as far as their families know, they have already passed away and had donated their bodies to science. However, in order for the science project to work, the bodies must be alive. Each of the people in this place have to have a certain type of body in order for the project to work. The project is an injection that each individual have had in order to "unage." The process is that they still have birthdays every year, but instead of aging, they are getting younger. By the time Amelia is 16 and Anny Beth is 18 (and out of 50 participants), these two are the only ones left as far as the agency knows and they must either go back to the agency and entrust themselves to be taken care of by the doctors there or find someone to care for them before they become infants again.
Will Amelia and Anny Beth find someone in time? Or will they decide to trust the agency to provide for them?
I really enjoyed this book. It took me just a few hours of reading - mostly because I could not put it down. In the author's note at the back of the book, Haddix explains where she came up with the idea of "Turnabout:"

"I bought a card for a friend, joking that it's actually good that we get older, not younger, on our birthdays because - as the punch line went - who would want to live through puberty twice? It made me wonder: What if someone had to? I already had age and aging on my mind because I'd just attended my grandmother's ninetieth birthday party, and I'd recently visited my husband's grandmother in Kentucky, a month before her death. Somehow all those things - the card's question, the ninetieth birthday, the Kentucky visit - meshed in my mind. Turnabout was the result."