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May 21, 2023

New Softcover Summer Reads: Poignant Time Travel Tale and Lifelong Friendship Threatened by Land Dispute

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub. The author of bestselling novels like All Adults Here, The Vacationers, and Modern Lovers is something of a rock star in the bookstore world. In addition to being a writer, Straub is co-owner of Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York. With her new novel, just out in paperback, Straub delivers her own take on the increasingly popular subject of time travel in a warm and witty father-daughter story. Here's a description from the publisher:

On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice’s life isn’t terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn’t exactly the one she expected. She’s happy with her apartment, her romantic status, her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her 16th birthday. But it isn’t just her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush, it’s her dad: the vital, charming, 40-something version of her father with whom she is reunited. Now armed with a new perspective on her own life and his, some past events take on new meaning. Is there anything that she would change if she could? 

In its review of the book, The New York Times wrote, "Even if the premise of This Time Tomorrow is a flight from realism, the scope of Alice's concerns is human-scale and plausible. . .although her travels through time allow her to reconsider her romantic history, the person whose past she is most eager to set right is her father, a man whose imminent mortality deepens the novel's ambient nostalgia into something pressing and poignant."

Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark. This novel about a lifelong friendship between two very different women has "book club" written all over it now that it's in paperback. We meet the protagonists as octogenarians and soon realize that their relationship - never easy over the years - will be severely tested over a coveted piece of family-owned land on the coast of Maine.

Celebrated children’s book author Agnes Lee is determined to permanently protect the peninsula known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friend, Polly Wister. Polly has led a different kind of life than Agnes: she's a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, a philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. Those life choices, and the disapproval it has always provoked in the feminist Agnes, make any decision about the land more difficult. Polly's loyalties are torn between the wishes of her best friend and those of her sons — the oldest of whom wants to develop the prized property. Matters come to a head when the two women finally have it out with each other, bringing to the surface long-held secrets and resentments. That leaves author Dark with the last third of the book to reconcile Agnes and Polly and resolve the land dispute, and she manages both nicely.

In a starred review last year, Publishers Weekly wrote, "Dark celebrates women's friendships and artistic mentorship in this expansive yet intimate novel. The families and their grudges and grievances fill a broad canvas, and within it Dark delves deeply into the relationships between Agnes and her work, humans and the land, mothers and children, and, most indelibly, the sustenance and joy provided by a long-held female friendship. It's a remarkable achievement."