This Time Tomorrow
This is a love story, but it’s the love between a daughter and her father. It involves time travel, but don’t let that scare you off. It’s the sliding door type of time travel, not sci-fi time travel with complicated, mind-bending scientific explanations. instead, the focus is on relationships.
Alice is not exactly unhappy with her life, but it’s the eve of her 40th birthday and she is taking stock of her life. Her career dreams have fizzled, just like her love life, and her father is lying in a hospital bed, nearing the end of his life. Understandably, Alice has already begun grieving.
“grief was something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the other, farther away from the window, but it was always there.”
She ends up drinking a bit too much, and wakes up in 1996 on her 16th birthday. Her father, Leonard, is in the prime of his life, young and vibrant in ways she did not remember or appreciate when she was 16. As she is herself. How fun would it be to see and appreciate the people and things in your world at 16, through 40-year-old eyes?
“Things were always changing, even when they didn’t feel like it. Alice wondered if no one ever felt as old as they were because it happened so slowly, and you were only ever one day slower and creakier, and the world changed so gradually that by the time cars had evolved from boxy to smooth, or green taxis had joined the yellow ones, or Metrocards had replaced tokens, you were used to it. Everyone was a lobster in the pot.”
Alice has a chance to spend time with her dad, appreciate him in ways she didn’t the first time around, and perhaps help him (and herself) make different choices. For those of us who have lost our parents, it’s a dream come true to have more time, or know them when they were young. So poignant and beautifully done by the author.
Alice discovers that she can return to this day again and again, always going back to her 16th birthday and then forward to age 40. Each time Alice goes forward to age 40, she must live with the different choices she makes. Is her different life one that fits her? Can she change everything or are some things in life inevitable regardless of the choices we make? Does she eventually end up in the life that is perfect for her? Is perfect even attainable? Can regret be avoided? What exactly makes up a happy life (spoiler: probably not the Disney version)? All thought-provoking questions that leads to self-reflection for Alice, and for me, the reader.
Straub approaches this familiar trope differently than most authors by not focusing on the “what-ifs”. It’s so much more, and I loved being on this journey with Alice and Leonard.
This sounds like it could go one of two ways: sweetly saccharine or depressingly heavy. But it is neither. Straub uses warmth, humor and fun 90’s nostalgia, as well as a nod to her love of NYC to lighten the story. I loved the pop culture, and the pleasures of the simple and mundane. I loved the relationship between father and daughter, as well as Alice’s relationship with her best friend, Sam.
(Thank goodness Straub didn’t make the teenagers annoying or angsty. And thank goodness Ursula, her cat when she was 16, is still alive when she is 40! Perhaps Ursula has unlocked the secret to immortality?)
This is one of those rare books that I loved so much, I struggle to articulate my thoughts. Why did this book resonate so deeply? I’m not sure. Perhaps because I have lost both my parents and I would dearly love to have just one more day with them. Or I like the idea of traveling back in time, not to change my life, but to spend it with my family and loved ones when we were all younger, and appreciate every messy moment.
Everyone is different, but I would not hesitate to read this even in the midst of recent loss. I find it cathartic and soothing. At the time she was writing the book her father, the author Peter Straub, was in the ICU for months and passed away in Sept of 2022.
All the stars for this touching, heartwarming story, which will be on my 2022 favorites list.
• Marin Ireland narrated the audiobook, and did a phenomenal job!
