Written by Emma Straub, this story focuses on a woman’s belated coming-of-age—how she changes her relationship with her father and how she grows and changes. Or…maybe it’s not belated because it’s also a time-travel book where she goes back in time to do her growing. It has a bit of magical realism.
I enjoyed the read. Straub divided the story into Six Parts. The ten-pages of Part Four’s short-hop time travels felt bumpy, but it didn’t detract from my overall pleasure from the story.
Act I-normal world
falling apart
We meet Alice living her ordinary life. Almost 40 years old, she is discontent.
photo of hardcover book titled, This Time Tomorrow written by Emma Straub
She likes her job—her boss, her coworker, the children—but it wasn’t what she had imagined doing. She enjoys sex with her boyfriend, but they live separately and that’s fine with her. She loves her best friend, but Sam is happily married, busy with children, and pregnant with her fourth. Alice loves her dad, but he now lays unresponsive in the hospital, dying.
Dissatisfied with her life, she gets some little pushes in the middle of Act I.
Her boyfriend Matt invites Alice to a posh restaurant. She FaceTimes with Sam, who tells her this is it! He’s going to propose to her.
“When Sam and Josh had gotten married, seeing Sam in her sleek white silk dress, dancing to Whitney Houston with all the Black women in her family and the Jewish women in Josh’s family, Alice thought: This is what real happiness looks like, and I’m never going to have this.”
Matt proposes.
“Alice had never introduced Matt to her father. Sam thought it was weird, but Alice thought it was weird that Sam liked being pregnant. It was obvious that Leonard and Matt wouldn’t particularly like each other, and so it had never seemed worth it.”
She turns him down. He talks about a high school girlfriend, recently divorced.
She meets her old high school crush, his wife, and their child.
She wonders, what if..
Her boss announces her retirement.
Maybe Alice could…?
Someone from a different department has already been hired to be the new boss.
Act II-entering a new world
a second chance?
Alice celebrates her 40th birthday with Sam. But when Sam’s youngest child needs stitches, she leaves early.
At 3 am in the morning after having stopped at a bar, Alice is drunk and heads to her father’s home nearby, her childhood home. Unable to find her key, she sleeps in his little guardhouse, his shed.
The next morning, she wakes up in her old bedroom and her dad is eating breakfast at the kitchen table. It’s her 16th birthday. She has a 16-year-old body and a 40-year-old’s regrets and questions.
“She’d seen her father every day, then every week or so, for her entire life. There was never a gap, a time when she could see him with fresh eyes.”
Alice makes little changes. She tells Sam, who eventually accepts that Alice has indeed time traveled, that she’s going to “take ownership of my feelings and act on them instead of being afraid all the time, I think that will change my life.”
She asks her dad to walk her to school. While she and Sam have her birthday supper with Alice’s dad, they encourage him to write another book, this time about girls time traveling. At her birthday party, she has sex with her high school crush and later tells him to eventually marry her. Then she tells her Dad that she has time traveled.
She wonders, can she save her dad from his life of becoming hospitalized, unresponsive and dying.
Act III-new normal
not sure about this…
Alice’s life and world has changed dramatically. It is the ideal life she had dreamed. Sort of. It seems a bit odd though. At her big birthday party in her new normal life, she runs away.
Passing by a shop with a psychic, she goes in and asks, “How do I know if I’m living the right life?”
In Part Four, she does several time travels to her 16-year-old self again. She relishes the meals and fun things with her dad and with teenage Sam. This part reminds me strongly of Richard Bach’s book “One” with parallel timelines.
But Alice is still trying to put together a future where she and her dad have their lives “fixed” and they’re both happy.
I invite you to pick up the story and read it to find out which ending Alice chooses.