BOOK BRIEFS
Author: Emma Straub
Genre: Time Travel Fiction
Setting: Upper West Side of Manhattan
I say I don’t like the fantasy genre, and yet, here I am. I am sure this book’s classification is not fantasy, researching for its genre it’s “time travel fiction” and “domestic fiction.” For me, time travel is fantasy. In any case, I loved it. The characters are well developed, even the secondary and the ones on the fringe of the story. Alice Stern and her father, Leonard, have an endearing father-daughter relationship.
Traveling to your past may seem like the best idea to figure out why you’ve landed in your present and Emma Straub delineates a clear line between the choices a teenager made, the choices that were made for her, her life growing up, and her present. What is life, after all?
Though some authors use the back-and-forth too much for my liking, in this piece you quite enjoy the traveling back and forth of Alice and Leonard’s lives.
I guess it was also cathartic for me, having lost my father a few years ago, and Alice being confronted with the imminent death of her own dad. She goes through their life together, the decisions he made in life that affected her, and her own decisions, and wonders if there’s anything she can change, does she want to?
It is set in the Upper West Side of Manhattan where she lives and works. She is the head of the admissions department of the private school she attended decades earlier. When she celebrates her 40th birthday with a few too many drinks, she wakes up on the morning of her 16th birthday. She realizes what’s happened and wonders what would ensue if she tweaks her day. Will her life change?
Time will tell.