This Time Tomorrow
A Novel
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3.9 • 300 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“The pages brim with tenderness and an appreciation for what we had and who we were. I could not have loved it more."—Ann Patchett
“The kind of book that will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you call the people you love. Exceptional."—Emily Henry
"Delightful"—Boston Globe
"Poignant"—New York Times
What 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 40th 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, 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 16th 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, 40-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?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Emma Straub takes a beloved romantic-comedy trope—the middle-aged woman’s sudden return to her teenage years—in a delightful new direction. Her heroine, Alice, is on the verge of turning 40 and, you guys, she’s fine with it. She’s content with her job, her apartment, her love life…everything except her strained relationship with her ailing father. So when Alice wakes up in 1996, once again a 16-year-old, she doesn’t go chasing after one of her hunky alt-rocker classmates, instead spending her time hanging out with her dad, who turns out to be kinda awesome. Straub absolutely nails the whole Clueless-meets-My So-Called Life vibe of the mid-’90s Upper West Side, never letting the parent-child relationship get too melodramatic or schmaltzy. This Time Tomorrow is nostalgic, wistful, charming, and a whole lot of fun.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Straub (All Adults Here) offers a delightful take on time travel involving a woman and her famous father. As it opens, Alice Stern, a week shy of 40, is visiting her gravely ill father, Leonard, author of a bestselling time-travel novel, in the hospital. Her parents divorced when she was six, and she has remained extremely close to her father ever since. She lives alone in the Brooklyn apartment she's had since she was 25, dates a guy named Matt, and works in the admissions office at the prestigious high school she attended. When she hears about former classmate Tommy Joffey's son applying to the school, she remembers how they were close until he had sex with another girl at Alice's 16th birthday party. Then Matt proposes, and she breaks up with him. After a big night of drinks on her birthday, she sleeps in the guardhouse on her father's property. When she wakes up, it's her 16th birthday in 1996. As a 40-year-old presenting as a teen, she sets out to reverse her father's fate as well as change what happens with Tommy. She also learns Leonard can time-travel, too, a twist that Straub skillfully exploits without letting things get confusing, and which enriches the impact of love and loss on the characters. Readers will be captivated. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated where the character Matt worked.
Customer Reviews
Not horrible, but not great.
It takes a while for the story to get going, leaving me wondering what the book is actually about until about halfway through, but didn’t leave me feeling satisfied at the end.
Dull and boring
I tried to like this book and it had potential but it was so dull and painfully boring to read.
Waste of Time travel premise
Less engaging version of the story seen in the film “About Time.”