Staff Pick: This Time Tomorrow

On Alice Stern’s fortieth birthday, she is concerned about her beloved, ailing father and staying connected to her closest friend. She feels stuck, living alone in a small studio apartment in Manhattan and working at the secondary school that she attended over twenty years earlier. The next day she discovers that she has inadvertently traveled back into her life at sixteen years old and tries to navigate how she can influence the future through that one day in her past.

As someone who was also an angsty teenager in the mid-nineties, I felt transported to that time through Straub’s sharp and detailed portrayal of Alice when she returns to her past and ends up doing so over and over through the course of the story. The novel explores how small choices can have large impacts on our lives, illustrates ways that our relationships shape us, and underscores what we take for granted when we get swept up in our day-to-day lives.

As Alice gets comfortable exploring the realities of time travel and learns the ways that altering one day in 1996 influences the future of herself and her loved ones, she teases apart the strands of possibility that feel endless at sixteen and narrow into a solidified reality decades later. Through a series of entertaining and (for me) nostalgic adventures, Alice connects with her father in meaningful ways, and her bond with him is revealed as the true foundation of the story.