March 14, 2022
Straub (All Adults Here) offers a delightful take on time travel involving a woman and her famous father. As it opens, Alice Stern, a week shy of 40, is visiting her gravely ill father, Leonard, author of a bestselling time-travel novel, in the hospital. Her parents divorced when she was six, and she has remained extremely close to her father ever since. She lives alone in the Brooklyn apartment she’s had since she was 25, dates a guy named Matt, and works in the admissions office at the prestigious high school she attended. When she hears about former classmate Tommy Joffey’s son applying to the school, she remembers how they were close until he had sex with another girl at Alice’s 16th birthday party. Then Matt proposes, and she breaks up with him. After a big night of drinks on her birthday, she sleeps in the guardhouse on her father’s property. When she wakes up, it’s her 16th birthday in 1996. As a 40-year-old presenting as a teen, she sets out to reverse her father’s fate as well as change what happens with Tommy. She also learns Leonard can time-travel, too, a twist that Straub skillfully exploits without letting things get confusing, and which enriches the impact of love and loss on the characters. Readers will be captivated. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (May)Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated where the character Matt worked.
September 1, 2022
Best-selling novelist Straub (All Adults Here) uses time travel to imagine how decisions influence future selves--or not. Alice is celebrating her 40th birthday. She is relatively happy, although she wonders whether she could have made better choices along the way. Her father, Leonard, is dying of an undiagnosed illness, causing Alice grief and anxiety. After a birthday binge at a subway bar, Alice goes to her childhood home. Once there, she can't find her keys, so she settles down in the property's garden shack, where she falls asleep. She then wakes up in her childhood bed on her 16th birthday in 1996, 24 years earlier. She finds her father hale and hearty, just as he had been. With her 16-year-old body and her 40-year-old perspective, life choices take on a different meaning. Alice learns she can travel back and forth to this one day anytime. In her many subsequent visits to the past, she tries out different decisions to see how they change the future. This remarkable story addresses the hopes and fears of every adult. Narrator Marin Ireland deftly portrays a wide range of emotions that drive the story. VERDICT Highly recommended for listeners of general and science fiction.--Joanna M. Burkhardt
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