THIS TIME TOMORROW

In Emma Straub’s deliciously magical and heartwarming novel This Time Tomorrow, it’s Alice’s 40th birthday, but she doesn’t have much to celebrate: a decent but lackluster romance, a rewarding but dead end job, and a dear father who is nearing the end of his life. When Alice wakes up the next morning to find that it’s her 16th birthday - in 1996! - she must make sense of her apparent ability to travel through time. Should she harness this development to right wrongs, fix mistakes and create a different life? Or has the life she was meant to have right there all along?

I recently read that nostalgia is an emotional pacifier that helps us get through stressful times - if so, then I want to live inside this book! But what this novel does best is reflect on all the important things that transcend time in all its pliability, like the best parts of ourselves, and love that never goes away. Losses happen in each stage, as parents and children, but how lucky we are to experience all of it, these gifts: in past, present and future! Infused with the unique bond of father and daughter, lifelong besties, teenage crushes and 90s NYC culture, This Time Tomorrow challenges the earthly boundaries of time, life, grief and love.

It’s a rare and wonderful book indeed that can honor the specific joys of Tasti D Lite while suspending the time space continuum! This book was like biting into an explosion cake of my 90s life in NYC: Isola, where I ate pasta and pretended not to gape at local celebs; Jackson Hole, where my youngest would have his very first burger one day. And in all of Alice’s trips to the past, GRAY’S PAPAYA, with the most perfect hot dogs and “papaya” soft drinks: maybe the best fast food joint ever imagined. This book is a love letter to New York City and all the ways it moves forward, with favorite places changing with each passing year, and the ways it stays the same, like Gray’s Papaya hot dogs, which I hope will endure forever.