REVIEW: “This Time Tomorrow” by Emma Straub

“If anything, she understood that it wasn’t actually something one could ever work all the way through, like a jigsaw puzzle or a Rubik’s cube; grief was something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the other, farther away from the window, but it was always there. A part of you that you couldn’t wish or pray or drink or exercise away. She was used to him being so close to gone that gone was almost desirable – no one wanted to watch someone they loved suffer. But she was also tired – tired of how tense her body was when the phone rang, tired of how nervous she felt whenever she walked out of his hospital room, tired of how it felt to know that her life was going to change and that she was going to have this enormous hole forever. Soon.”
Emma Straub

Read this if:

Time Travel tropes from your childhood (i.e. 13 Going on 30, Back To The Future) still hold a warm and fuzzy place in your heart.
You’ve ever lost a loved one, or are on the brink of losing a loved one.

My thoughts:

I usually wait to write reviews after I’ve had a few days to process a book, because most of the time – time grants me clarity. For the best books, however, clarity is immediate. This book was immediate.

Someone I love dearly has been fighting for her life for a year now.

When I read the concept of this book (a daughter travels back in time on her 40th birthday and the eve of her father’s death), I knew it was one that my book-loving mother-in-law would’ve chosen. Choosing to read it was both my way of feeling close to her and also processing my emotions toward her own battle.

I put on a brave face in public.

I cathartic cried 3 times in the span of 15 pages in private.

This Time Tomorrow is a vibrant, refreshing, and compassionate take on time travel. I can’t help but feel that the very thing that motivated me to read it was it’s deeper purpose in being published in the first place. It is a message of love. True love. True enduring love. How Straub talks about love and loss feels deeply personal, and her literary voice soothed aching parts of my heart that I have been trying to cover up and ignore. If I could hug a complete stranger, I’d hug Straub, thank her, and then ugly cry all over her shoulder.

There is not a damn thing I’d change about this book.

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