Reviewed by Kristin
Alice is pretty much satisfied with her life. She works in admissions at the private school she herself attended. She has her own affordable apartment in New York. She has romantic prospects, but is deciding that she may be better off unattached. She is still close with her childhood best friend, even if Sam is married and seemingly eternally pregnant. Her father Leonard is aging though, and currently in the hospital in a coma.
On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice finds herself in the exact right place at the exact right time to find out what might have been.
Yes, Emma Straub has taken the familiar trope of discovering all the what-ifs, if only one could travel back in time and live life differently. But this author takes an atypical angle, and does it very well.
Alice finds herself back in her childhood home on the morning of her 16th birthday. Leonard is there, looking much younger than Alice remembers he was. It's not some lost boyfriend who Alice is most motivated to bring into her 40 year old life; it's the healthy version of her father who she misses.
I won't go into too much detail to avoid spoilers. I will say only that the characters resonated in a way that most don't, and the reason may be because the author was going through losing her own father, horror author Peter Straub, while she was writing this novel. In the acknowledgements, she talks about her father encouraging her to write a fictionalized version of her own story. I can imagine that writing about time travel to an earlier time to be with a missing family member must have been at once wrenching and cathartic.
I'm now off to find even more Emma Straub books. This Time Tomorrow may have been the first I have read, but it won't be the last.
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