Onyx reviews: This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 11/24/2022

What would you do if you could go back in time as often as you wanted and change whatever you wished to see how these alterations play out in your life a quarter of a century later? The catches are: you can only go back to the same day and you have less than a day to make changes. It's a little like the series Russian Doll, except you don't have to die to reset everything.

This is the conundrum facing Alice Stern on the night of her fortieth birthday. After an ill-advised trip to a late-night bar, she passes out in the unused guardhouse in front of her father's Manhattan apartment. When she wakes up, like her namesake she has gone down a rabbit hole. She's sixteen again, except she has all her memories of her adult self. Better memories, in fact, than she has of the day that is to follow, which is also her birthday. She knows there will be a memorable party attended by many of her friends, but many of the details are hazy.

Forty-year-old Alice works in admissions at Belvedere, the same prestigious private school she attended as a girl. One of the last interviews she conducted before her trip to the past was with the adult version of a boy she had a crush on but never managed to become more than friends with. She remembers that Tommy hooked up with another girl at her 16th birthday party and she's determined that this time will be different.

Her 21st century life isn't terrible, but neither is it particularly exciting. She once dreamed of being an artist, but that aspiration fell by the wayside. She is feeling stagnated at Belvedere and breaks up with her current boyfriend when he proposes to her at an elegant dinner. The one constant in her life has been her father, Leonard. Her mother took off when she was six and, although Alice hears from her occasionally, she's never had a maternal presence. Without a husband or children to tie her down, Alice is free to do whatever she wants from day to day—but what does she want?

Leonard Stern is the author of Time Brothers, a cult favorite novel about time-traveling siblings that was adapted into a long-running TV series. He is a popular guest of honor at fan conventions and the income from the book and its adaptation have afforded him a comfortable life with his daughter on Manhattan's Upper West Side. One cute scene has young Alice joining Leonard at one of these conventions, hanging out late at night in a suite with several of his inebriated author friends as they discuss possible time travel scenarios.

Although he claims to be writing all the time, Leonard has never published anything else. Now, a long life of overindulgence has left him in poor health. In addition to attempting to shift the trajectory of her own life, Alice is determined to convince her youthful father to make better choices. Encouraging him to quit smoking is high on her priority list.

Small changes on the night of her birthday party have dramatic impacts, often unforeseen. Did she really want to end up married to Tommy with a couple of kids living in a mansion? Would it be worth sacrificing another long-term relationship and her freedom for that? When her sixteen-year-old self reveals her secret to her friend Sam, they have lengthy discussions about all the known variations of time travel in popular culture. Is this a Back to the Future scenario or something else?

And what if she isn't the only person who can travel in time? Maybe other people are trying to change the trajectories of their own lives. It has the potential to be rather confusing and entangled, but Straub manages to keep it from becoming so. Alice makes the most of her time with her much younger father in 1996, engaging him in the kinds of discussions her older self regretted not having at the time. Nothing she does, though, seems to have an effect on his health (although other, significant changes to his life do occur) and she is faced with having to lose him every time she bounces back to the present.

Knowing the circumstances Straub was dealing with while working on this novel—the serious illness her father, author Peter Straub was enduring—makes This Time Tomorrow even more poignant.