Book #99 of 2022:
This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
This novel is pretty good, but it’s a little short and takes too much of its limited space to actually get to the point. It’s a time travel story about a forty-year-old woman who discovers a way to revisit her sixteenth birthday, but she doesn’t get there until around a quarter through the text, and we’re well beyond the halfway mark before she finds out that her father has made similar trips himself and learns from him the basic rules of the mechanism. (It basically functions like the portal from Stephen King’s 11/22/63: only leading to one particular day, where your changes can affect the future you return to. Going back again directs you to the same destination, undoing your previous actions. Except here, your consciousness alone makes the journey, always arriving in the past in the body of your younger self.) The actual stakes appear in the last 15% of the book, when the protagonist starts making visit after visit, seeing what possible fates she can create and aiming to avert her dad’s terminal medical condition that seems a constant in each one.
All of these are interesting concepts that are handled fine by author Emma Straub — other than the heroine seizing the opportunity to sleep with her high school crush, which reads like a sleazy act of statutory rape to me — but they just aren’t given enough time to register. If this plot had unfolded over a lengthier narrative, or at least had used its minimal page count more efficiently, its tale of losing a parent right as you’re gaining an adult understanding of who they were in your childhood could have achieved real pathos. But I feel as though I still barely know these characters, in any iteration.
[Content warning for alcohol abuse.]
★★★☆☆
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