This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

My library holds list is always a surprise, as books I put on hold ages ago (and forgotten) unexpectedly become available. Such was the case with This Time Tomorrow, a time travel novel, which is a favorite genre here at Book Barmy. I’m definitely fascinated by the concept.

I dove right in…abandoning the other books on my teetering stack.

The novel opens with Alice on the eve of her 40th birthday taking stock of her life. Her career dreams have fizzled, her love life is empty, and her father is lying in a hospital bed, nearing the end of his life. Understandably, Alice has already begun grieving.

Grief was something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the other, farther away from the window, but it was always there.

After drinking way too much, Alice wakes up in 1996 on her 16th birthday. Her father, Leonard, is in the prime of his life — young, and vibrant in ways she failed to appreciate at 16. He is a famous author, having written his own highly successful time travel novel which is going to be made into a television program. This first time back in time (yes there will be others) Alice is star struck by her father and overwhelmed with love and regret.

When she was young, she’d thought he was old, and now that he was old, Alice realized how young he’d been. Perspective was unfair.

Alice herself is full of life and bubbly at 16. She also has the teenage angst and heartbreak which she can remedy with hindsight. She makes choices she was afraid of at 16 and corrects hurtful actions with her closest friend. It also turns out that high school is just as dreadful as she remembers. (Just imagine what would it be like to see and appreciate your world at 16, but with 40-year-old perspective.)

Now I’m going to stop for a moment here and reflect on the time travel genre. Usually these novels focus on the well known trope – the ‘do-over’; what can be changed, making different choices, and catastrophic events avoided – and there are good ones and bad ones.

Instead, Ms. Straub focuses on the smaller, more intimate human character changes. This Time Tomorrow lets Alice change things that are more subtle –to change the future for her father — helping her father get healthier, encouraging him to continue with a second novel, making sure she shows up at his publicity junkets. There’s also self-reflection for Alice, cultivating her own self-trust – and also sharpening her love and appreciation for what actually did happen. I found this so interesting and refreshingly different.

Alice discovers that she can return to this day again and again, always going back to her 16th birthday and then forward to age 40. Each trip back in time increases her awareness and appreciation of her past, as well as the joys in her present day.

Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you.

This highly readable novel is filled with lovely little gems that stick with the reader. There’s the never aging cat Ursula (named after Ursula Le Guin), the embarrassing teenage years, and the wonderful descriptions of New York City (shout outs throughout to Gray’s Papaya). I found the depiction of the gated Pomander Walk where young Alice and Lawrence live so charming, that I had to look it up. Here are some photos.

This is an engaging, hopeful and entrancing novel about about regret, about alternatives and above all about love with an ending that’s as satisfying as it is bittersweet. It choked me up and caused me to think about how the pieces of our lives can be rearranged, to form a new picture, simply by being mindful of the choices we make.

This Time Tomorrow reflects on the transitory nature of life and reminds us of the need to tangibly appreciate our closest friends and loved ones in the here and now. Alice gets a second chance to do this through time travel – a reminder to us mere mortals, stuck in the present time.

It’s not about the time. It’s about how you spend it. Where you put your energy.

This Time Tomorrow is very reminiscent of one of my favorite films – “About Time” which I also loved.

You can see it on Amazon Prime.