... delightful ... Straub is wise enough to know that despite having ample time, it’s never enough ... Implicitly, then, Straub’s This Time Tomorrow is telling us there’s a more important lesson we actually need to learn, and that is how to let go. Live life well, and then let it go, our own and the lives of our loved ones — and that’s the best we can do.
Even if the premise of This Time Tomorrow is a flight from realism, the scope of Alice’s concerns is human-scale and plausible ... The novel is shot through with aching Our Town celebrations of the mundane, but its most explicit affiliations are with genre and pop culture. In a few instances, familiar character types, or narrative tropes — a dopey boyfriend who feels pressured to propose, a wise and comforting psychic — show up like old friends in a creased photo, two-dimensional but worth holding onto ... Even as it rifles through references, This Time Tomorrow insists on its own originality ... For anyone who lived in New York in 1996, the book provides sweet snippets of lost memories and associations...But its most complex and specific evocations are reserved for the relationship between an amiable, if slightly checked-out, single father and his city-kid daughter, a girl expected to be the solid one in the relationship.
Straub is not so much concerned with time travel mechanics, the butterfly effect, or killing baby Hitler (or whatever the 1990s equivalent of that moral test would be). Straub is concerned with love – its different forms and expressions, how it evolves over time, and how we can be better at giving and accepting it.
... an entertaining charmer that unleashes the magic of time travel to sweeten its exploration of potentially heavy themes like mortality, the march of time, and how little decisions can alter your life ... Straub has come through with another delightful summer read.
A surprising bildungsroman and excellent beach reading. It fizzes like pop and goes down easily while offering nutritional literary value ... This Time Tomorrow doesn’t partake of the usual clichés associated with midlife crises ... Straub maintains a delicious sort of control, moving backward and forward in time, dancing through various futures for Alice. The result is a beguiling performance and one of the knockout reads of the summer. This Time Tomorrow is a touching and suspenseful novel, ripe with ideas, brilliantly plotted, and generous with its dashes of humor.
This addictive and lovely novel is Straub’s 'smallest' so far, focusing ultimately on a single character and her most treasured relationship. Yet it contains no less of Straub’s signature warmth and authenticity. Alice asks herself questions we all might, given the opportunity to enter a broom closet and exit as our former selves, and has trouble letting go of her newfound ability or knowing when she should.
With wonderful place details, This Time Tomorrow evokes the Upper West Side of the 1990s and offers some sly observations on class, especially the subtle gradations between New York’s merely privileged and its ultra-privileged. Alice’s high school scenes are sprinkled with ’90s music and pop culture references, which will be especially enjoyable for millennial readers. This Time Tomorrow’s many references to other time-travel stories occasionally stray into metafictional territory, but ultimately it’s a story with a lot of heart, some satisfying plot twists and a bittersweet, open-ended finale.
Add Emma Straub to the list of authors who have taken on the mind-bending topic of time travel, which she does with great aplomb ... expert light touch ... What follows is a poignant take on a familiar question: What if one could go back and change the course of history? It's not an original concept, but Straub puts her spin on it with the same endearing charm evident in her previous novels ... a warm-hearted tribute to the value of simple pleasures and the fragile beauty inherent in every moment.
As always, Straub creates characters who feel fully alive, exploring the subtleties of their thoughts, feelings, and relationship ... Combine Straub's usual warmth and insight with the fun of time travel and you have a winner.
