This Time Tomorrow doesn't stick the landing: a review

I am not generally a fan of when forty-year-old women go back in time to seduce teenagers. I get that she ends up in a teenage body. I get that during the actual sex scene, her teenage self completely takes over. However, leading up to the sex scene, the forty-year-old is still very much involved in the seduction part, using her knowledge and maturity to her advantage. She literally says that she's now old enough to understand that eighteen-year-old boys are confused, and they just need to be told what to do, which is exactly what she does in order to allow her younger self to live out an unrealized fantasy. I'm okay with protagonists who are unlikable, but the narrative gave me no reason to believe that this scene was supposed to be read as ethically questionable. At most, the sex scene was supposed to be mildly cringeworthy. All teenagers, after all, are mildly cringeworthy.

Anyway, even without that extremely uncomfortable scene, This Time Tomorrow is, at best, mediocre. The premise is that Alice, our protagonist, gets to repeatedly relive her sixteenth birthday. It's not terrible as a character study about someone with serious commitment issues. I also think Alice makes a few very funny and realistic observations about her home in Manhattan. As someone who was a scholarship kid at a private high school school on the Upper East Side, I can confirm that Alice's experiences with very wealthy people are dead accurate. The first few chapters definitely got a number of laughs out of me. After those first few chapters, however, things grow a little stale. The novel, at its heart, is not about being baffled by rich people. It's about Alice's relationship with her father, and their dynamic is so unremarkable that I kept expecting some big reveal to come along to explain why the story is fixated so much on this one thing. In the end, no big reveal comes along. There's no major plot twist. All we get is a few trite epiphanies about love, loss, and making the best of the time you have.

There are also way too many pages focused on Alice comparing her time-traveling experiences with various books and movies. We're subjected to some long, repetitive, and shallow analyses of those books and movies, and I'm not sure what the point of it all was, except to show me that Alice, despite clearly being exposed to a lot of time-travel stories, can't really rub two brain cells together in order to say something interesting about what she's consumed. She's never meant to appear particularly smart or intellectual, but she is supposed to be an artist. She's also the daughter of an author. I expected her to have opinions about books beyond a summary about what kinds of time travel they feature. I got the impression that the author wanted Alice's conversations about time travel to seem very nerdy, but perhaps Emma Straub hasn't spoken to enough nerds in her life. Nerds tend to go way more in depth. I know I'm nitpicking at this point, but the plot circles back to so many shallow conversations about Back to the Future or Kindred, and it got on my nerves. This Time Tomorrow is trying to pay homage to time-travel stories, I think, but it doesn't really succeed. It just lists those stories a few times too many before moving on to Alice seducing a teenage boy.

If you can't tell, I didn't like this novel, but I will acknowledge that the ending did make me emotional. I actually got angry myself for allowing it to tug at my heartstrings, but I won't lie: it worked. I'm not going to forgive the book's other flaws, but I guess I can recommend it to any readers who just want a good cry that doesn't feel cheap.