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Have you ever lived a life that feels… well, ordinary? Not particularly special, and not in the skin you’re meant to be in? Emma Straub examines this emotion in This Time Tomorrow, a melancholy and unique take on time travel fiction.
Every day, Alice visits her beloved father Leonard at the hospital, but he is slowly fading away, forgetting the past as he succumbs to terminal cancer. She lives separately from her boyfriend, Matt, but enjoys this, at least until he dumps her when she rejects his marriage proposal. She loves her job as a guidance counselor at a local prep school, but has just been passed over for a big promotion. It’s a good thing she has friends like Emily, Melinda and especially her lifelong best friend Sam to help her out.
But a lonely-on-her-fortieth-birthday Alice can’t stop herself from taking a trip down memory lane as she drunkenly spends her Saturday alone. She wanders back into her childhood neighborhood, then falls into a drunken sleep in the neighborhood’s guard house. When she wakes up, she’s in her childhood bedroom, in her childhood bed. She rapidly realizes she’s been returned – somehow – to the day of her sixteenth birthday.
Now Alice has a chance to make different choices, spend time with her dad while he’s healthy, and right some romantic wrongs. But changing the past just seems to make things more difficult for Alice, and she finds herself stuck in a time loop. Will spending time with Tommy, an old childhood acquaintance, change her future? And if her future is changed, is it what she really wants?
This Time Tomorrow is a heartbreaking and beautiful story about a woman’s race to save her father from the ravages of terminal illness, about what she really wants from life – and if what she seems to want is really worth changing her life over.
Alice is a great heroine who is easy to like. Her story is about finally learning to let her father go more than anything else. And the relationship between Alice and single dad Leonard, whose wife died when Alice was young, is singular and touching in a novel filled with great, realistic relationships. Alice does manage to improve his life in multiple ways, though I won’t reveal any of those here. If you have ever had to deal with the death of a parent and wished you could go back, you will weep buckets at this book.
I will warn you that this is not a romance; while Alice does come to believe that being with Tommy might make her life better, things are much, much more complicated than that, and in the end she discovers life as his high-class wife doesn’t fit her either. The novel is much, much deeper than a story about romantic love making everything perfect in a woman’s life. She cannot force herself into the shoe of well-heeled motherhood any more than her old life fits her. Straub dares to suggest that perfection isn’t the point. That regret can never be avoided. That sometimes, marriage and motherhood isn’t the be all and end all of a person’s life. And, more importantly, that sometimes the friends we have are more important than the opportunities we pass up.
That’s where the strong, iron-coated friendship between Sam and Alice comes in. The relationship between them is utterly perfect, and I can’t give high enough praise to the way Straub writes about it.
I can’t overlook the incredibly lovely portrait of New York City the author gives us. We go from borough to borough, street to street, and know the landscape of Sam’s home just as well as she does.
This Time Tomorrow is a work of perfection. Maybe it struck a cord with me because I’m forty, maybe because my own mother is dead, but it was a perfect reading experience.
Buy it at: Amazon, Audible or your local independent retailer
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Grade: A
Book Type: Time Travel Fiction
Sensuality: Subtle
Review Date: 22/05/22
Publication Date: 05/2022
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.