The air shifted around me as I finished this book. It was one of those books that I knew was becoming a part of me as I got deeper and deeper into the story.

It's wasn't just that it was taking its place in my memory or among the bank of stories I love and will share. It became embedded in my skin, in my roots, in the very brain cells that fired as every word on the pages connected to a new part of me.

I can't remember the last time I read a book that caused that kind of genetic reshuffling. As if the ethereal bookshelf in the library of my brain shifted, every book I've loved before moving over to make room for it.

In This Time Tomorrow, Emma Straub introduces us to Alice Stern on her 40th birthday. And as she confronts this new decade, she realizes that she is uncertain of her future and that she may (or may not) have regrets of her past. Should she get married? Did she want children? Was this really her career? How'd she get on this path and was it one she actively chose?

As she looks back, she stumbles into an unusual predicament. She wakes up on her birthday yet again but this time, she's turning 16. With her mind both 40 and 16, she realizes she can live through her relationships once again, particularly the one with her father, with a new set of eyes. And it will change who they both will be in the future. In doing so, she confronts love and loss in a way only those of us who know grief can dream of.

I finished this book on my late mother's birthday, a day I often can't help but think about time in a strange, non-linear kind of way. And this book both transported me through time and trapped me in that linear moment. How I wished I could be like Alice, Leonard and Dawn! How I'd love to see my mother as my mother when she was the age I am now with a daughter (me) the age of my daughter now.

And while it devastated me (I only sobbed for like, an hour after I put the book down), it gave me something to hold on to. Stories. Stories are a way to travel through time. Stories are my wormhole. "That was the magic, how the same story could be told an infinite number of ways." And so I'll tell my little one stories. Stories to keep us both traveling through time, together, forever.

The Only One Left by Riley Sager

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dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced