“This Time Tomorrow” by Emma Staub

It has been a while since I last wrote on this site. I have been quite busy and that left me with little to no creative energy to write. I was trying to find the time to read though. One of my recent ones is “This Time Tomorrow” by Emma Staub.

Before reading “This Time Tomorrow”, I googled if it was a love story. Yes, but between a parent and a child, that’s the answer that Google gave me. I decided to give the book a try and I really liked it. Although, at some point, the writing gets a bit repetitive and you can feel the lack of plot development, I loved the themes and the writing style. But let’s start from the beginning.

The protagonist of the story is Alice Stern who is about to turn 40. She feels somewhat okay about her life but she is not completely happy: she is dating someone she does not love, her work is quite mediocre but most importantly, her dad is quite sick in the hospital and that grieves her constantly. After having her birthday dinner with her best friend Sam, she falls asleep in a small shed on her father’s property since she forgot the keys and wakes up when she is 16. She has a chance to live through one day – her 16th birthday – once again and change whatever she wants to change without knowing the direct impact on her future life. She later on discovers how she can keep on going to that same day and changes different variables trying to find a way to save her father.

I liked the gentle relationship between Alice and her father and it felt in a way nostalgic. I can see sometimes the same gentleness in my father’s attitude towards me, although our relationship is not simple. There is just something incredibly sweet and touching in this book. But it is also bittersweet because you realize that your parents age. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

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“Now it was harder for him to pay attention and he had to ask her the same question over and over again. Leonard remembered Sam and Tommy but couldn’t have named anyone Alice worked with. Alice understood – this was how it worked. When she was young, she’d thought he was old, and now that he was old, Alice realized how young he’d been. Perspective was unfair.”

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“Being a parent seemed like a truly shitty job – by the time you were old and wise enough to understand what mistakes you’d made, there was literally no chance that your children would listen.”

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“The Sterns had never gone hiking, they’d never gone camping, they didn’t like the beach or national parks or whatever it was that normal families did. All they had done was this – talk. Be in their neighbourhood, their tiny kingdom. That was the stuff that Alice wanted to soak up, to absorb as much as she possibly could. What did it feel like, to have their strides match, hurry in the face of an oncoming taxi? What did it feel like to have her father next to her, to hear him grumble and hum, make the noises just beneath language? What did it feel like to see him and not worry if it would be the last time?

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“Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you. Transcendental meditation, maybe, but with hot dogs and the knowledge that everything would change, the good and the bad, and so you might as well appreciate the good.”

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“She hadn’t spent the last twenty-odd years wishing that she’d been with Tommy, that she’d married Tommy, but she had spent the last twenty-odd years learning that waiting was an inefficient way to get what she wanted. If Alice was going to do anything better, it was that – making her wishes known.”

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“Alice and her father had always been such good friends. It was luck, she knew, plain luck, that gave some families complementary personalities. So many people spent their lives wishing to be understood.”

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“Any story could be a comedy or a tragedy, depending on where you ended it. That was the magic, how the same story could be told an infinite number of ways.”

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It is a nice and sweet read so definitely recommend it.