This Time Tomorrow

As soon as I read about Emma Straub's latest, This Time Tomorrow, I immediately requested it from the library. I'd heard it was a non-fantastical time travel book, if that makes any sense. I was anxious to read it. Happily, it did not disappoint at all and was a most enjoyable read.

Alice is a content almost 40-year old who was raised on Pomander Walk in Manhattan, now living in Brooklyn. After college, she started working at the private high school she attended and all these years later is still working there. Her father is in a hospital towards the end of his life. After having dinner with her lifelong best friend, Alice has a few drinks alone to celebrate her 40th birthday. She then returns to her childhood home to reflect on life. Did she to easily just go with the flow? Is something missing in her life? She wakes up the following morning in the storage shed on Pomander Walk and it's 1996. She's 16. Her father is a young, vibrant 40-something year old man. Pretty close to Alice's current age.

Once Alice realizes the "secret" of her time travel, she repeatedly returns to the past to see if her actions can change her father's outcome without changing anything else. Can that be done? What would you do if you could have a do-over? Alice's story repeats itself in many different ways each time she returns to the past. But what has really changed?

I learned that Straub wrote this novel in 2020 when her father was gravely ill and she was closely reexamining their past lives. She used her writing to process what she was going through in her own life. It shows as this book is clearly written from the heart.

This is my favorite quote from the book as well as being a good reminder for us all.

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. Transcendental meditation, maybe, but with hot dogs and the knowledge that everything would change, the good and the bad, and so you might as well appreciate the good.

This Time Tomorrow is also a celebration of New York City. I'd never heard of Pomander Walk but now I'd love to go back to New York and check it out. Part of Alice's teenage birthday routine was going to Papaya King, a hot dog spot that somehow, even though I was eating hot dogs in the 1970s, I never went to. Even though Alice is years younger than I am, a lot of her New York City descriptors made me feeling quite nostalgic.

I'd highly recommend this novel, even to those who don't think they're into time travel. Time travel is what allows Alice to think about life. Her reflecting is the larger part of this compelling story.