By Kelly Keene

I didn’t know anything about this book before I picked it up. I think somebody had given it to me as a gift, so I chose it to read simply because it found its way onto my shelf. This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub was also sitting on my desk once when another teacher came into my classroom, and she asked if I was reading it. Her facial expression told me, when I was only a few chapters in, that maybe this wasn’t going to be the best book ever. The time travel concept is cool, but the execution, not so much. 

The premise is that Alice is about to turn 40, and her father, who she loves dearly, is in the hospital in a kind of vegetative state. Alice’s  best friend, Sam, has a family and busy life, while Alice exists in the periphery. Alice works at her old private school in New York as an admissions advisor. She gets some sort of sick satisfaction at wielding this power over privileged parents who apply to send their kids there. She doesn’t really have any strong connections to anyone except her father. Considering that we don’t even get to fully meet her father until part two, this makes for a very slow, pathetic start. Alice’s character didn’t have too much going for her. She had a casual friendship with one of her co-workers, and an unrequited love interest in her old high school boyfriend who shows up to enroll his child in the school that she works at. 

On her 40th birthday, she gets drunk, takes a photo at a bar by herself, and then falls asleep in the garden shed of her childhood home. Her cat, Ursula, is by far the best character in the entire novel, and one of my other main issues with the story is that we do not explore Ursula’s plot line nearly enough. Ursula is young and healthy even though she’s  been alive for well over 20 years. When we later learn that time travel damages the long-term health of those that do it, I am left confused, mostly, because Ursala has apparently been doing it all just fine. 

Alice’s father, as a character, had some potential to be intriguing. He made his money writing books about time travel. But ultimately he was just an irresponsible dad who did not help guide Alice at all, and spent a great chunk of his life reliving the day Alice was born. Which, if you think about it, isn’t the best day to relive with your kid. They are just a crying little baby that day. 

The day after her 40th, Alice wakes up to discover that she’s traveled back to her 16th birthday and gets to relive that day over again, reuniting with her 16 year old version of Sam, and finally getting a chance to be with Tommy, her High School love interest. Originally, her 16th birthday was the day Tommy decided to sleep with someone that wasn’t her, so why she spent the next 26 years pining after him, is beyond me.

My overall take is that I didn’t really care for any of the characters in this book. If I don’t like any of the characters, it’s hard to get invested in whether or not they will solve the mystery of the time travel, or accomplish their goals. Alice’s goal was to heal her father and stop him from ending up in a coma. But this made Alice pretty one-dimensional. She didn’t really give anything to anyone else, and was kind of self-absorbed. She smoked a lot and it felt like her father and her may have had a codependent relationship. Despite her primary goal of getting her father out of a hospital, Alice and her father were never super healthy; it just wasn’t believable. 

Overall, the logistics of the time travel in this novel were cool, until we got to the end and realized that because her dad had also traveled in time, that was what had deteriorated his health. So while she kept trying to crack the code to save him, she was doing the exact thing he had done to put him in that situation. Did her father tell her any of this when he had the chance? No. 
Alice sort of learned the value of revisiting moments that she loved, but she lived a good part of her life repeating her 16th birthday Groundhog Day  style and ultimately nothing really changed. On her first return back to her 40-year-old timeline, she discovers she succeeded in marrying the love of her life, had multiple kids she loved, lived in a really beautiful house, and still had a somewhat good relationship with Sam. I think the author did not want this to be Alice’s ending, as an explicit snub to the anti-feminist narrative that, “if only a heroine could find the right man, and have babies, then that is all she needs to feel complete in life.” I like the rejection of that notion, but for a character who so valued her relationship with her own father, it felt odd for her not to value her relationship with her own kids. That beautiful life seemed less fulfilling than her original one, but we never really got a good reason as to why. This time tomorrow, I will hopefully no longer need to think about this book ever again.