This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Time-Travel, Contemporary, Recent Historical
Rating: 4 stars
Reviewed by LavenderWhat if you could take a vacation to your past?
With her celebrated humor, insight, and heart, beloved New York Times bestseller Emma Straub offers her own twist on traditional time travel tropes and a different kind of love story.
On the eve of her fortieth birthday, Alice’s life isn’t terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn’t exactly the one she expected. She’s happy with her apartment, her romantic status, and her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning, she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her sixteenth birthday. But it isn’t just her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush—it’s her dad, the vital, charming, forty-something version of her father with whom she is reunited. Now armed with a new perspective on her own life and his, some past events take on new meaning. Is there anything that she would change if she could?
Emma is forty but gets to be sixteen again. Now’s the time to change some things. On her fortieth birthday, Emma wakes up in the home of her single father, and she’s a lot younger. So is he. She has some decisions to make.
Emma interacts with her teenage friends and boyfriends and alters history. Then she goes back to her present and sees the differences. In many ways, her life is better, but still, something is wrong.
Also, in her present, her dad is dying. Can she change this? She is going to go back and try.
Probably the best feature of this book is the relationship between Emma and her dad. He’s an author, and he’s doing the best he can to be a great dad. He and Emma are close. There are many touching father-daughter moments in this book.
Sam, Emma’s best friend, makes for a good sounding-board as Emma opens up to her and tells her what’s really going on. Their relationship is well-developed too.
Other characters come into play. Their importance lies in how they make Emma ponder things and make changes. She comes to realizations along the way.
The time travel aspect is clever, and one doesn’t know quite what to expect. This is a fun book more about relationships than anything.
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