I recently read This Time Tomorrow which I picked for my neighborhood book club that I am a part of. It was the first book that I chose for book club and was so nervous that it was going to turn out to be bad and everyone was going to hate it. Luckily, I ended up liking the book and so did everyone else in book club! It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on here, much less a book review like I was intending to do monthly, so I figured I would do a little review of it on here!
Synopsis
This Time Tomorrow tells the story of Alice who is turning 40. Her life isn’t exactly as she expected it to go but she isn’t unhappy. She’s content with her job, apartment, and love life (or lack thereof), but it feels like something is missing and like things could be different if she had changed things differently. Her fathers health is failing and she wonders if there is a way to change his outcome. She wakes up the next morning to relive her 16 year old birthday, and grapples with if there is anything she could change.
Themes
The big themes in this book that spoke most deeply to me were grappling with death of a loved one, the parent-child relationship, adult friendships, and the potential for our lives.
I personally found Alice to not be very relatable to myself and that could be why I didn’t love this book more. She’s very rebellious as a teenager (I was far from that as a teen). The parts about her apathy to her love life and to having children was also not relatable to me personally.
Despite this, her relationship with her dad and the respect and love they have for one another did make me emotional. Now that I’m a parent myself, I found certain lines to be more profound to me now then they likely would have been if I read this book a year or two ago.
“No one talks about that—at least not to dads. Maybe moms talk about it more—I bet they do. But no one ever talked to me about it, that’s for sure—what it feels like to love someone so much, and then have them change into someone else. You love that new person, but it’s different, and it all happens so fast, even the parts that feel like they just last for fucking ever while they’re happening.”
Page 277
Especially as I watch my own parents get older, it’s hard to think about the day when I won’t be able to call them up and ask for advice, validation about something, or just to chat. This book was a sweet reminder to hold onto these moments that I have with them now, because it’s hard to know how many we truly have.
Alice’s best friend from high school also played an important role in the story and this book did a good job illustrating how those friendships change as we enter adulthood and then change even more when moves, weddings, and babies happen.
The problem with adulthood was feeling like everything came with a timer—a dinner date with Sam was at most two hours, with other friends, probably not even as long.
Page 135
Most of Alice’s friendships now felt like they were virtual, like the pen pals of her youth. It was so easy to go years without seeing someone in person, to keep up to date just through the pictures they posted of their dog or their baby or their lunch.
Page 135
People changed and they didn’t. People evolved and they didn’t. Alice imagined a graph that showed how much people’s personalities shifted after high school on one axis and on the other, how many miles away from home they had moved. It was easy to stay the same when you were looking at the same walls. Layered on top would be how easy your life was along the way, how many levels of privilege surrounded you like a tiny glass object in a sea of packing peanuts.
Page 158
While I am a stay at home mom now, before I had Theo, I was a nurse. I’ve worked in multiple areas, but the first place I worked was a medical ICU. As you can guess, it’s often a pretty depressing place and we often have to face death and see family members have to say their final goodbyes to their loved ones. That part of my job never got easier for me. I still carry the memories of my patients that passed away and their family members. This quote really rang so true to me in that experience, and in my experiences of losing family members myself.
Alice saw it now: all her life, she’d thought of death as the single moment, the heart stopping, the final breath, but now she knew that it could be much more like giving birth, with nine months of preparation. Her father was heavily pregnant with death, and there was little to do but wait—his doctors and nurses, her mother in California, his friends and neighbors, and most of all, the two of them.
Page 5
The theme of the potential for our lives and whether we had done one thing differently how things might be better or worse was the last theme that really struck me. One of my 2023 resolutions was to be more mindful of things that I am thankful for; therefore, I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on things in my life that I hold most dearly. Like if I had chosen a different dorm to live in in college, I likely never would have met my husband and my life could look similar, but perhaps not. Could be with someone else, or without kids. I genuinely love my life so much and my family, that it cause me to be so thankful for all of those little decisions or happenings of fate that had to happen for me to land right where I am.
It is easy though to get comfortable in your life and not challenge yourself, take risks, etc. and obviously the main plot of this book is exploring that idea.
There were good reasons and bad reasons to do anything. Her father had floated on purpose, holding fast, never going too far, and then Alice had done the same thing by accident. It was the worst fact of parenthood, that what you did mattered so much more than anything you said.
Page 148
At the end of the day though, if you are happy in your life, taking a risk to potentially improve it, can have inherent negatives to it as well. And “coasting” and not taking risks is not an inherently bad thing. We are all on our own journeys and making our own choices to our own comfort levels and being mindful of the good in each day is the real secret to happiness. For some people that good may be centered around a career, or a home, or a family, so what people take risks on to achieve is going to vary.
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.
Page 130
I know that the ending was very intentionally supposed to be open-ended for a reason, but I wish we had gotten a little something. That point disappointed me a bit!
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.
Page 306
Happy endings were too much for some people, false and cheap, but hope—hope was honest. Hope was good.
Page 306
The time traveling trope is not new, and this was a good take on it. Especially with the focus on the relationship with her dad. and I read The Midnight Library in the past few years which is VERY similar to this book in a lot of ways. If I’m comparing the two though, I preferred the midnight library.
Warning! Spoilers Ahead:
Did anyone else think it was weird how Alice’s dad came about discovering that the shed was where you had the ability to time travel back? Like that it was on discussion boards online? Haha, that and their whole hypothesis of how it happens was one part of the plot where I was so lost.
Final Rating
Rating: 3.75/5
Overall this was a really easy read. I think this would be a great book club pick because there are a lot of points for discussion, but it is equally a good book if you just need a novel to read this summer!
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