That’s 8 summer books read now, so it’s time for another review, I’m getting behind in them.
I’ve been meaning to read more novels by Emma Straub ever since I read her debut, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, which I loved. Despite its central SF conceit of time travel which may put some non-SF readers off, it’s really a story of familial love between a daughter and her father. Rebecca at Bookish Beck really enjoyed this novel which was published in 2022 (her review here), and it was in my piles… It begins with Alice visiting her father in hospital:
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 neighbours, and most of all the two of them. It could only end one way, and it would only happen once. […] The only surprise left would be when it happened, the actual day, and then all the days that followed, […]. He was only seventy-three years old. In a week, Alice would turn forty. She would feel immeasurably older when he was gone.
Alice has reached that point in mid-life where she’s questioning everything. She works in admissions at the same private high school she attended and has missed out on a promotion. She worries her boyfriend might propose, and her beloved dad, who brought her up when her mother ran off is terminally ill in hospital. Leonard is the author of a cult SF novel, never managing a sequel, but having a good career at SF conventions, until he got ill.
On the eve of her birthday, Alice gets terribly drunk and ends up at her childhood home. When she wakes up the next morning, she’s back in her bed in her teenaged body, on her 16th birthday. It’s 1996, and she has to go to school She tells her best friend Sam that she’s come from the future and Sam, to her credit, believes her to the extent that she believes that Alice believes it and goes along with it, becoming convinced she’s telling the truth in time.
Alice, meanwhile, begins to work out how her time-travel works, and how she can influence things in her younger life. She comes and goes, and experiences many different ‘Sliding door’ type alternate lives, but Leonard, who’d had quite an unhealthy lifestyle always gets ill; her friend Sam is a constant though, as is Ursula the cat – who remains unperturbed by it all.
The first few cycles are leisurely, giving us time to get to know the 16-year-old Alice’s life as she works things out, and as she, and we, get used to things, Straub speeds the pace up so the cycles get progressively quicker and the effects, as you might imagine, begin to catch up with Alice. I can’t possibly say how Straub brings things to a close, but it’s well done and will bring a lump to your throat.
Wisely, Straub doesn’t dwell on the mechanics of her time portal – mixing elements of Peggy Sue Got Married ( a film Alice rewatches before it happens) with Sliding Doors type scenarios and the Groundhog Day thing of going back to her 16th birthday. There is a lovely scene at a SF convention in one life though where her dad’s author friends are all telling her how the different modes of time-travel work.
At the novel’s heart is the father-daughter relationship and Straub makes Leonard a great fun dad, no wonder Alice adored him so. Revisiting Rebecca’s review, she mentions that Emma Straub’s own father, Peter Straub, the horror and mystery novelist, had died as she was reading it shortly after publication. It seems obvious that he is the model for Leonard, and this makes it all the more poignant a read.
If you don’t normally read SF, don’t worry, the time travel here is consistent within its own system, but not demanding of the reader. Just enjoy the wonderful story.
Source: Own copy. Michael Joseph hardback, 292 pages. BUY in paperback at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.
