Wes is stuck. He should be spending his twenties finishing the schooling that will help him land a career in movies, just like he’s always dreamed about. Instead he divides his time between clerking in the most low-rent video store in Queens, and caring for a mom struggling with Alzheimer’s. His father’s out of the picture, and he has no realistic means of finding care for her—beyond the harried home nurse who’s already on the brink of quitting—but even though he’s sure his mother won’t even remember his efforts, he’s still committed to her. Still, he doesn’t have much to do outside life’s boring routines, except pressing Play and Rewind to try and identify the moments when it all went wrong. (And maybe watching the random vacation video that some customer left at the store to be copied.)

Then: change. A friend from high school returns to the neighborhood after a mysterious absence, and a disreputable man from the neighborhood takes over the store. (He may or may not be mobbed up. Who can say, really? It’s not the sort of thing you ask your new boss.) And he finds out his father may be closer than he thinks. In short order, Wes’s life’s starting to look different. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is tough to say—the store’s new owner wants to make easy money selling bootleg videos out front, and we all know the FBI frowns on that sort of thing; the high school friend may be too eager to make amends, and to hide the secrets of her own past mistakes—but still, it’s something. Now Wes has to navigate feelings far more frightening than stasis, and find a way forward despite everything pulling him back.

Play, Rewind is a lovely literary look at a place near and dear to our hearts, one we all might want to visit if we had a time machine—the video store. (And it sends us to another vanished place, peaceful and innocent pre-9/11 New York.) More importantly, it’s a great glimpse into lives we can all relate to, people struggling against impossible odds, unsure if anything will ever change. It’s a fantastic debut novel from an amazing new author—John Vurro.

"I loved it so much that after I read it, I wanted to rewind back to the beginning and read it again. Vurro’s is a bold and brilliant new literary voice. This beautiful novel moved me deeply.”
— Alena Graedon, author of The Word Exchange