This Time Tomorrow

I just loved This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub. Y’all know I love a good wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey story, when linear time is folded and twisted for character and plot purposes.

The opening of This Time Tomorrow almost riffs on a romcom, but with a middle-aged protag. Alice gets passed over for a promotion, which means she’ll just keep doing private-school admissions for the children of her private-school classmates. Her bestie means to get into the city for Alice’s 40th birthday, but arrives late and leaves early for mom reasons. It’s the lol such-a-mess of 10,000 romantic comedy leads, only instead of meet-cuteing a perfect man, though, Alice bumps into a time machine.

So the morning after her 40th birthday, Alice wakes up back on her 16th birthday. She’s disoriented, of course, but also delighted to have more time with her aging father and see her lifelong bestie as a teen again. And maybe have a do-over? Alice hops back and forth between 16 and 40, seeing how changes and choices in her teenage years ripple out through her life. The novel doesn’t spend too much time on how time travel works, which means that there’s no technobabble to wade through and no flux capacitors to procure. There’s no world to save and no evil mastermind to escape. Alice — and her scifi writer dad, Leonard — are simply able to move between certain points in their lives and see what will happen.  Leonard mentions trying to make changes to get Alice’s mother to stay with them, but found that life with a depressed, trapped wife was much worse than single fatherhood.

Alice tries all different approaches to her life. Some of these feel like a riff on a romcom, again. Alice, at 16, hooks up with a high-school crush and then finds herself at 40, married to him. He remains, in all realities, perfectly sweet and not particularly interesting. Because there’s no technobabble explaining the details, there’s enough time to see different versions of Alice and Leonard. The overall feeling in this book is there’s no “right” path, no one is going to land a perfect life with no problems and no regrets, but there’s a hopefulness around the lifelong relationships.

The real magic in this is how Alice uses her time travel to spend time doing nothing with her dad. There’s a wonderful sweetness in this.  Of course we can’t stop time, the novel seems to say, but what if we could get another evening hanging out together? Or two evenings? She also pops back to her teens, and tries to get her dad to quit smoking and start eating better, so that he’ll be healthier in his 70s. What if we could just get a little more time together?

I also loved some of the NYC gems in this one. Yes, there are some of the obligatory Manhattan highlights, like a visit to the Museum of Natural History, but there’s more. 40-year-old Alice knows that it really takes less time to get into the city from Montclair than from Brooklyn, even thought teenage Manhattanites balk at the idea of New Jersey. It was fun to recognize some of the Manhattan spots, there was a wonderful familiarity for me. But if you don’t, it’s fine, the point isn’t New York namedropping as much as it’s about familiar places changing over time. What if we could get one more meal at a diner that’s closed now?

This is absolutely how I would use my time-travel powers. Great book.