This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

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?

The Reason

Full disclosure, the reason I picked this book up was because I had just finished another book on audio right before bed, and I needed a new one to sleep to (I have trouble falling asleep and audiobooks help), and these were one of the books my library had available immediately.

To be fair, I was also intrigued by the time-travel aspect, because I love time-travel stories and philosophical questions of “what would you do if you could go back in time…?” so that’s also the reason I picked it out of the other available audiobooks my library had.

The Quotes

“Any story could be a comedy or a tragedy, depending on where you ended it. That was the magic. How the same story could be told an infinite number of ways.”

“All her life, she’d thought of death as the single moment, the heart stopping, the final breath, but now she knew that it could be much more like giving birth, with nine months of preparations. Her father was heavily pregnant with death, and there was little to do but wait.”

“The way you spend your days is the way you spend your life.”

“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.”

The Characters

I’m a character-driven reader so I gotta talk a bit about them. I’m not gonna list out all the characters here, only the ones who stood out to me and why I liked/disliked them.

Alice – the MC and time-traveler. I found her a little wishy-washy at first, but then I realized later how relatable that was, because heck, I have no idea what I’m doing either. What I loved about her was that she was able to experiment and grow from the mistakes she made and lessons she learned. Maybe she didn’t really know what was important to her in the beginning, but I think she figured it out at the end.

Leonard – Alice’s father. I loved what a great father he was and the way he was so present for Alice. I also love that he wasn’t too stubborn to take advice and suggestions from teenagers. There’s just something so wholesome about him as a father, and the way he took care of Alice.

Sam – Alice’s best friend. I love how supportive she was as a friend. Going along with Alice even when she was skeptical, and being all in anyway. I wish we could all have a friend like Sam.

Ursula – the cat. Oh, the cat. I loved that cat. I love that she was there the whole time.

My Thoughts

This book started out slow for me at first. I was quite lukewarm about it in the beginning but I got more and more into it as we got to know Alice and watch her journey. I really loved that this book was about relationships and the people we love. I love that at the end of the day, the things that matter most aren’t status and material things, like the house you live in or the clothes you wear, but that you are happy and have people whom you love and who love you.

My Feels

This book made me feel big feelings. I do ask myself that question sometimes, “What would you do if you could go back in time?” and I have a lot of grief and regrets about certain things, and I sometimes wonder if I could’ve changed anything or “saved” anyone, and I realize you can’t really change or save anyone except yourself, and I honestly might’ve settled for just saving myself if I could go back in time. Reading this book, watching Alice discovering herself through this journey, and seeing the kind of relationship Alice had with her father was just absolutely beautiful.

My Rating

5/5 stars. I wavered a little between 4 and 5 stars because the beginning was slow and I wasn’t feeling Alice at first, but I think that was sort of the point, and the fact that it tugged at my emotions so hard means that it more than deserves 5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?