This Time Tomorrow

September 1, 2022

Best-selling novelist Straub (All Adults Here) uses time travel to imagine how decisions influence future selves--or not. Alice is celebrating her 40th birthday. She is relatively happy, although she wonders whether she could have made better choices along the way. Her father, Leonard, is dying of an undiagnosed illness, causing Alice grief and anxiety. After a birthday binge at a subway bar, Alice goes to her childhood home. Once there, she can't find her keys, so she settles down in the property's garden shack, where she falls asleep. She then wakes up in her childhood bed on her 16th birthday in 1996, 24 years earlier. She finds her father hale and hearty, just as he had been. With her 16-year-old body and her 40-year-old perspective, life choices take on a different meaning. Alice learns she can travel back and forth to this one day anytime. In her many subsequent visits to the past, she tries out different decisions to see how they change the future. This remarkable story addresses the hopes and fears of every adult. Narrator Marin Ireland deftly portrays a wide range of emotions that drive the story. VERDICT Highly recommended for listeners of general and science fiction.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

As This Time Tomorrow opens, Alice Stern is about to turn 40, and her life is mostly fine—not great, but fine. She works in the admissions office of the private school she once attended, she has a boyfriend and a handful of good friends, and she’s content to live alone in her basement studio in Brooklyn. But one aspect that’s not fine is Alice’s dad, Leonard, who’s dying. Leonard is essentially Alice’s only family, and she spends all of her free time visiting the unconscious Leonard in the hospital. Read more: Your 2022 BookPage summer reading guide Late on the night of Alice’s birthday, something mysterious happens, and when she wakes the next morning, she’s 16 years old and in her childhood home. With the help of her longtime best friend, Sam, who was with Alice on her original 16th birthday, Alice begins to puzzle out her new reality. What follows is a time-travel story that blends aspects of other time-travel and time-loop stories, such as the movies Peggy Sue Got Married and Groundhog Day, which Alice references as she unravels her own mystery. The novel lays the groundwork for its more fantastical elements by situating Alice in a storybook setting: She grew up in a small house on Pomander Walk, a tiny hidden neighborhood of Tudor-style houses on New York City’s Upper West Side. When Alice was little, Leonard wrote a time-travel novel, Time Brothers, a mega-bestseller that spawned a much-loved TV series. He never published another book, but instead devoted himself to caring for Alice and attending fan conventions, where he and his writer friends debated fictional time travel. While This Time Tomorrow is propelled by Alice’s quest to figure out what happened and learn what she can about her dad's illness, it’s also a dual coming-of-age story. The novel’s more meditative passages convey Alice’s midlife regrets, her loneliness at being left behind by the friends who’ve married and had children, her yearning for something beyond the life she’s made and her grief and love for her dying dad. Like Alice, author Emma Straub is a New York City native whose father is a well-known novelist. With wonderful place details, This Time Tomorrow evokes the Upper West Side of the 1990s and offers some sly observations on class, especially the subtle gradations between New York’s merely privileged and its ultra-privileged. Alice’s high school scenes are sprinkled with ’90s music and pop culture references, which will be especially enjoyable for millennial readers. This Time Tomorrow’s many references to other time-travel stories occasionally stray into metafictional territory, but ultimately it's a story with a lot of heart, some satisfying plot twists and a bittersweet, open-ended finale.