A review by bhnmt61
This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

4.0

I like Emma Straub’s writing, quite a bit. So I was unsurprised that I liked it here, too. I’m not the only one to have noticed that there is a growing number of books about time travel to revisit/fix your past (How to Live Safely…, Dark Matter), or some kind of afterlife where you get another chance to figure out what you missed or did wrong in your life (Midnight Library, Under the Whispering Door). This one is absorbing and easy to read, but it’s a little unsteady on its feet. In the beginning it’s hard to tell exactly where Straub is headed—I remember thinking at one point if she’s trying to make us think Alice has a drab, disappointing life, she’s not doing a very good job of it. Then once Alice is whisked back to the past, we spend way too long on a single day when she was sixteen—which wouldn’t be a problem except ensuing trips back to the past are given short shrift by comparison.

There are two relationships that make the book work— the relationship between Alice and her dad, and the one between Alice and her best friend Sam. The ending does justice to those two relationships but there are a whole lot of questions left unanswered (wait, what happened with Melinda? How did Sam know some of the things she knew? And what was the deal about Ursula? for starters). If you can turn off the part of your mind that wants to understand what is going on, this is a fun, interesting story. I was thoroughly absorbed. But it ended up being not quite as meaningful as I was hoping it would be.