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Book Summary and Reviews of This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

This Time Tomorrow

A Novel

by Emma Straub

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  • Published:
  • May 2022, 320 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

With her celebrated humor, insight, and heart, beloved New York Times bestseller Emma Straub offers her own twist on traditional time travel tropes, and a different kind of love story.

What if you could take a vacation to your past?

On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice's life isn't terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn't exactly the one she expected. She's happy with her apartment, her romantic status, her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her 16th birthday. But it isn't just her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush, it's her dad: the vital, charming, 40-something version of her father with whom she is reunited. Now armed with a new perspective on her own life and his, some past events take on new meaning. Is there anything that she would change if she could?

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
  1. Time travel is a genre we all know and love, especially if, like Alice, you were watching movies in the eighties and nineties. In what ways does This Time Tomorrow use time travel to explore themes of parent-child relationships, growing older, and growing up?
  2. Leonard Stern is Alice's beloved father, a writer of science fiction, an eater of Grape-Nuts and Gray's Papaya hot dogs, and a single parent. On page 135, Alice reflects that she "had never felt like she belonged to anyone—or like anyone belonged to her except for Leonard." How does Alice characterize the younger version of her father versus the older one? What does she learn about the types of love we feel for our parents at different ages?
  3. Straub writes with ...
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Reviews

Media Reviews

"As always, Straub creates characters who feel fully alive, exploring the subtleties of their thoughts, feelings, and relationships...Combine Straub's usual warmth and insight with the fun of time travel and you have a winner." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"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." - Booklist (starred review)

"[A] delightful take on time travel...Readers will be captivated." - Publishers Weekly

"Known for her plucky voice and sweetly amusing ensemble comedies, Emma Straub returns with her most emotionally resonant work yet…Beneath the layers of '90s nostalgia and sci-fi portals to the past lies something even more satisfying: a complicated tale that doesn't feel the slightest bit complicated." - Vogue

"Dig out your old band T's and crack open this charming family saga...Unlike other time travel stories, this one's not about figuring out how to get back to the present but how to appreciate it when you do." - Good Housekeeping

"A moving story about a father-daughter relationship...chronicles what happens when one 40-year-old woman wakes up and is suddenly 16 years old again. But it's not her youth she's riveted by—it's her father's." - Marie Claire

"Time travel is a popular trope in fiction, and Straub deploys it brilliantly in her effervescent new novel...Straub is an expert chronicler of social mores and the inner lives of her (mostly) bourgeois characters, and here she delivers a surefire bestseller." - Oprah Daily

"If I could time travel, I'd go back just far enough to start Emma Straub's beautiful novel This Time Tomorrow again for the first time. The pages brim with tenderness and an appreciation for what we had and who we were. I could not have loved it more." - Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of The Dutch House

This information about This Time Tomorrow was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Emma Straub Author Biography

Photo: Jennifer Bastian

Emma Straub is the New York Times-bestselling author of four novels—All Adults Here, The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures—and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her books have been published in more than 20 languages, and All Adults Here is currently in development as a television series. She and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York.

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