#Emma Straub

[novelconcepts]

Another year, another absurd amount of books read (296, because if I wasn't reading or writing this year, my brain was on fire). I was asked again for my top books of the year, so here we go: 2023's top 10, in no particular order.

This was the first book I read of the year--literally, vacated the hangout with my wife and sibling-in-laws to sit on their couch upstairs and eat through it. Do you love The Fall of the House of Usher, but wish for a nonbinary protagonist and a lot more mushrooms? This is the book for you! (T. Kingfisher is fucking rad, I made a concerted effort to only list ONE of her books on here, but honorable mention goes to The Twisted Ones for fucking me upppp.)

A gay, post-apocolyptic Pinocchio retelling involving copious robots, found family elements, and a cool-ass treehouse. Klune always hits for me with his unrepentant queer family dynamics and sense of humor. Honorable mention to the first two in the Green Creek series (although that's got a lot more...adult elements in among the werewolves, you've been warned).

I thiiiink I found this through The Homo Schedule podcast (PSA: if you missed out on Jasmin Savoy Brown and Liv Hewson doing a podcast together, now you know better), and it wrecked my shit. Tons of trigger warnings, as this is a memoir about abuse within a queer relationship, but it's so beautifully written. I personally suggest listening to the audiobook first, then standing anxiously behind someone at a book warehouse sale, hoping they'll set down the only paperback copy so you can swipe it.

A fantastical-historical reimagining in which the KKK is filled with literal monsters, and Black women are resistance fighters armed to take them out. Visceral and intense, and truly an excellent horror story.

Just. Such a soft time travel story about a daughter and her father and cherishing the time you get with loved ones. I was thoroughly unprepared for how lovely I found this one. It's very kind.

Spooky house, take-no-shit redhead, protective sibling elements, bisexual recluse with a sword who really just needs a nap. I haven't found a Harrow book yet I haven't slapped five stars on. She's so good at character and atmosphere, and I'm always surprised at how fast her stories race by.

The whole Daevabad trilogy (of which this is the first book) is just magical. A girl from the mortal world finds herself embroiled with the centuries-long prejudices and wars of djinn in a fantastical city. It's one of the rare stories of its kind that does have a love triangle, but doesn't feel like a love triangle; it's far less interested in the insufferable "who gets picked" than it is in the actual horrors these people are both perpetrating and coping with. It's an intoxicating ride.

Fuck You, TERFS: the book. Given that fact, there's obviously quite a lot of transphobia to deal with, but it's very clear that those people are wrong, and it's a super-engaging (and super-oh-god-what-comes-next) witchy time populated with queer, protective, interesting characters I'm excited to see again in the follow-up.

Have you ever wanted a haunted house story with visceral imagery and a rather lovely twist? Gailey has you covered. As much as I enjoyed The Echo Wife, I think I actually loved this one more, and it makes me so excited to see what else they've got up their sleeve.

One of my final reads for the year, when I was just churning through hardcovers at the speed of sound. I love this book. I recognize it won't be for everyone, but it takes so much of what I love about IT (one of my all-time favorite books, despite its flaws) and twists it through the lens of an author who escaped the Mormon church. It's horrific, it's fantastically abstract in places, it explores childhood and memory, imagination and abuse, and almost every character is queer. It's a great "I simply cannot sleep until I've finished" read.

[jennamacaroni]

There were too few opportunities, as an adult, to be surrounded by friends after midnight.

Emma Straub, "This Time Tomorrow"

[luveline]

This Time Tomorrow, Emma Straub

[kayteeaay]

“I’m just really going to miss you, you know?”Alice’s voice caught in her throat. “I don’t know how many people I really, really love, who really, really love me, you know what I mean? I know that sounds pathetic, but it’s true.”

“It is true,” Leonard said. “But that love doesn’t vanish. It’s still there, inside everything you do. Only this part of me is going somewhere, Al. The rest? You couldn’t get rid of it if you tried. And you never know what’s going to happen next. I was older than you are now when I met Debbie. Time to go forward into the breach. Until the future, at last.“

– Emma Straub – This Time Tomorrow

[scribblingcynic]

Alice wasn't a writer, but she'd spent enough time sitting at dinner tables with novelists to understand that fiction was a myth. Fictional stories, that is. Maybe there were bad ones out there, but the good ones, the GOOD ones--those were always true. Not the facts, not the rights and the lefts, not the plots, which could take place in outer space or in hell or anywhere in between, but the feelings. The feelings were the truth.

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

[desdasiwrites]

– Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

[amor-barato]

Estou te dizendo, El, essa oferta não muito boa é sinal de que provavelmente vão fazer uma oferta boa, boa mesmo. Tenho certeza — disse ela, abrindo o notebook e começando a digitar. — Estou só tirando tudo e começando de novo. Adoro isso, me sinto uma assassina.

Elliot ergueu a sobrancelha.

— Ah, é?

Wendy não olhou para ele.

— Isso é meio excitante, Wen

Agora ela olhou para ele. Elliot caminhou devagar de volta à mesa. O gerente do escritório ficava lá fora, no final do corredor. Fora do alcance dos olhos e fora do alcance dos ouvidos, sobretudo quando a porta estava fechada.

— Vou te dizer quando algo é excitante — disse Wendy, desmascarada por um tremor no lábio inferior. — Senta aí.

Elliot girou a cadeira para que ficasse ao lado da dela, ambos de costas para a porta. Wendy desabotoou a própria calça, depois a dele.

— Me pergunta se você pode me tocar — pediu ela.

— Posso te tocar? — perguntou Elliot.

— Sim.

Wendy pegou a mão de Elliot e deslizou pela cintura dela.

— Não vou perguntar nada — disse ela. Só vou fazer o que quiser com você, e você vai gostar.

— Sim — concordou Elliot.

Ele fechou os olhos, vibrando de concentração. Era como na época em que estavam na biblioteca da faculdade, tão famintos pelo corpo um do outro que transavam nos banheiros unissex.

Emma Straub (Somos todos adultos aqui)

[signal-failure]

This Time Tomorrow

I just loved This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub. Y’all know I love a good wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey story, when linear time is folded and twisted for character and plot purposes. The opening of This Time Tomorrow almost riffs on a romcom, but with a middle-aged protag. Alice gets passed over for a promotion, which means she’ll just keep doing private-school admissions for the children of her…

[ohjoyce]

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. There was maybe waiting for a table, there was a night at a bar, there was a party that went late, but even that was just a few hours of actual time spent. 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. There was never this-- a day spent floating from thing to another. This was how Alice imagined marriage, and family-- always having someone to float through the day with, someone with whom it didn't take three emails and six texts and a last minute reservation change to see one another. Everyone had it when they were kids, but only the truly gifted held on to it in adulthood.

This Time Tomorrow, Emma Straub

[mercerislandbooks]

Short Take: This Time Tomorrow

I know I said last week that female protagonists of a certain age were few and far between in fiction. And it’s true they are, but sometimes the universe decides your reading life is going have a few serendipitous book pairings. When I started listening to the audiobook of This Time Tomorrow, it was not because of the age of the main character. It was because Emily Henry blurbed the book and I love Emily Henry. And there’s time travel. So I decided to give it a whirl.

Our heroine, Alice Stern, is turning forty. She’d like a washer/dryer in her apartment and for her dad not to be terminally ill. Her job is fine, her boyfriend is decent, and her life is going along without much particular direction. But when Alice wakes up the day after her 40th birthday she finds herself in her old bedroom and her 16-year-old body. It’s the morning of her 16th birthday, her dad is relatively young and healthy and Alice has the disorienting chance to live this day over again, with the benefit of knowing what the future holds. Or so she thinks.

I’ve always enjoyed time travel books, though I get impatient with the explanations of how the actual time travel works. When I was younger I loved the concept of someone from my time getting to experience life in another time. Now I’m starting to like the idea of a person getting to see their earlier years with a different perspective.

Listening to This Time Tomorrow on audio forced me to slow down and let the mood of the story take it where it would, into a thoughtful nostalgia. I slowly fell in love with the dynamic between Alice and her dad, Leonard, and Alice and her best friend Sam. All the love in this book is centered around these two funny, irreverent, and deeply authentic relationships. As the book went on I wanted more of Alice and Leonard, more of Alice and Sam. In part because I think that was what Alice discovered she wanted too. More of these people who are, in the midst of everything, always there for her. 

This Time Tomorrow is for you if you want something quirky and nostalgic and gently sci-fi. An interesting pairing if you loved The Midnight Library. We still have some signed copies available!

— Lori

[jennamacaroni]

Alice wasn't a writer, but she'd spent enough time sitting at dinner tables with novelists to understand that fiction was a myth. Fictional stories, that is. Maybe there were bad ones out there, but the good ones, the good ones–those were always true. Not the facts, not the rights and the lefts, not the plots, which could take place in outer space or in hell or anywhere in between, but the feelings. The feelings were the truth.

Emma Straub, "This Time Tomorrow"

[shevababy]

No other love is like the love of a teenage girl, all passion and fire and endless devotion—at least for a week.

Emma Straub, "My Rayannes"

[kayteeaay]

Alice had already spent so much time grieving in the present that she didn’t quite know what to make of having her father in front of her, awake. The idea of Leonard dying, and what it would mean for the rest of her life, was heavy, but it was a familiar weight. Not that Alice thought she had worked her way through it – if anything, she understood that it wasn’t actually something one could ever work all the way through, like a jigsaw puzzle, or Rubik’s cube; grief, with something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the other, farther away from the window, but it was always there. A part of you that you couldn’t wish or pray or drink or exercise away.

– Emma Straub - This Time Tomorrow

[fizzreads]

I reread another book! Who is she?

I looked up my first post about this book, and at the time I said I loved it. But in my next post about an Emma Straub book, I said that while I loved The Vacationers, I couldn’t remember the plot.

I still loved it. Here’s the plot- a family from New York and a couple they’re friends with go on vacation to Mallorca, Spain. The couple is anxiously awaiting news of an adoption, one of the kids is about to go to college, the older kid (who lives in Miami and is dating an Older Woman) is having relationship trouble, and the parents are also having trouble because the husband cheated. Still a great read.