Start of Summer Reading

This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub, is a time travel novel. Alice works in admissions in her former New York City school and loves her best friend and her apartment and her father, who is slowly dying in the hospital. She goes to bed on the night of her 40th birthday, and wakes up in 1996, on her 16th birthday. The most surprising part of her former life is her father–young, healthy, vibrant. With the wisdom of her 40 years, what would she tell her 16 year old self? What would she tell her father? The book is a love letter to fathers, to writing (her father is a time-travel novelist), and to New York. I loved living in the pages of this story, and the quotes listed here show some themes from the book that completely reflect my ideal reading experience. This book covered them all.

I think I have read everything Emma Straub has written, and part of the reason I keep coming back is the New York content–it’s the setting for at least two of her novels, and it’s superb.  Emma Straub actually lives in New York and owns the Brooklyn bookstore Books are Magic. But outside the perfect setting, I mostly fall hard for her lovely writing style. You know you’re in a good writer’s hands when you don’t even care what she’s writing. You just want to live inside her words. I’m actually tired of the time travel trope (this is what happens when your husband is kind of addicted to it–he loves Back to the Future and Stephen King’s 11/22/63) but there is no way I wasn’t reading this book. 

It was a perfect way to start the summer: fiction that is true, simple joy in the moments, lots of hope, all the different possibilities for any story you begin. Oh, how I love the possibilities. Bring on summer, and all the summer books.