This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

• Release: May 2022
• Format: Novel
• Genre: Fantasy
• Audience: YA and Up
• Content: Definite Time Travel
• Original Language: English

“I know it’s your birthday,” Leonard said. “You’ve made me watch Sixteen Candles enough times to ensure that I wouldn’t let this one slide.”

VARIANTS

2 English variants

TAGS(SPOILERS!)

Time Periods

• Circa AD 1970 to 1999: target time period of 1996
• Circa AD 2000 to 2099: starting time period of 2020

Timeline Models

• Do Over
• Into a Changed Timeline with Just One You: Each time Annie returns to her present day, she goes into her changed life with little or no knowledge of her new life.
• Multiple Naive Timelines
• Remembering Different Timelines
• Resilient Timeline: Cosmic inertia makes it hard to change things.

Themes

• Fix Your Love Life!: Although even when she does end up with her teenage crush, she remains unhappy.
• Fix Your Own Past!: Alice believes she can fix her fatherr, her love life, and her career all by changing the choices she made on her sixteenth birthday.
• Repeat until You Get It Right: The focus is on Alice redoing her sixteenth birthday until she changes her father, her love life, and/or her career.
• Save Your Family!: Alice wants to change her father’s behavior so that he doesn’t end up in the hospital in 2020.
• Time Travel Sickness, Injuries, and Mixed-Up Body Parts: Alice herself says it feels like double vision, a little bit wobblier; and she also blames her father’s sickness on his time travel.
• Travels into Yourself
• Young Again!

TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY (SPOILERS!)

1. From the guardhouse outside Alice’s childhood home in Manhattan, between 3 and 4 a.m. on various days in October 2020 ⋙ to her childhood bedroom, the morning of her 16th birthday, 12 October 1996. Multiple round trips. Note: Alice gets repeated shots at reliving her 16th birthday.