This Time Tomorrow

I loved this book for its innovative approach to time travel. It’s not concerned with altering history but about time travel on a granular level. Alice travels back to her 16th birthday, which her 40-year-old self knows was a pivotal night. 

In the present day, Alice has remained friends with her high school best friend, Sam. I suspect many authors would have had them lose touch as adults and I loved that the novel is not predictably about Alice revisiting their high school friendship.

I also appreciated how Alice is entranced, at first, by the freedom of being a teenager… show more.

I loved the insight into father-daughter relationships that the author brought to this story! I’d read a couple of books by Emma Straub’s father (horror and suspense writer Peter Straub) when I was younger, so I was fascinated to read her work as well.

I could tell she tried to honor her dad with this deeply thoughtful novel. The time-travel element of the plot appealed to me greatly, but the reflections the author gave her main character—particularly with regard to having a clear-eyed view of one’s past and living life in the present without regret—were especially meaningful to me. I… show more.

I secretly believe that authors who write time travel are speculating about their own lives. What if we could travel back to our teen years? Emma Straub does just that in her novel, This Time Tomorrow. Straub grew up with a famous, loving, and supportive father in New York City, and so she takes her character, Alice, back there in the 90s to revisit herself at 16, hanging out with friends, going to the school where she now teaches. Except that this time, she might be able to save her dying father. Can she do it? Should she? Full… show more.