Another time travel novel; feels like I’ve read a bunch of those this year. I thought of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library while reading this, and I think I liked this one better overall. (It probably helps that This Time Tomorrow overflows with loving descriptions of a New York in the time when I lived there after graduating from college.1)
I liked that Straub’s time travel conceit is fairly constrained—this isn’t a book that kicks off a globe-and-era-spanning adventure. It’s smaller in scope, and a lot of the key moments happen in the minute shifts Alice and Leonard experience when looping back to the same day repeatedly. It’s a bit similar to Groundhog Day in that Alice returns to the same day in the past, trying to escape a trap…except the trap is her present day. Her eventual journey out of that loop didn’t carry a ton of surprise, but it was poignant (and freighted with more emotion than I expected, knowing some of the real-life story of Straub and her late father).
Before moving to Jersey City, and then Brooklyn, I also lived in West Orange, New Jersey, very close to the Montclair that Alice visits in one scene. ↩︎