Our Take

Emma Straub has a particular gift for the novel of second chances — stories about people at the hinge point of their lives, where the past and the possible briefly overlap. This Time Tomorrow did it through literal time travel; American Fantasy does it through the more mundane but equally disorienting magic of nostalgia. The boyband cruise is a wonderful comic premise, but Straub earns its emotional weight by taking Annie seriously — her divorce, her empty nest, her sense of having quietly misplaced herself somewhere along the way. The novel's best passages are about what music actually does to us — the way a song can bypass every defense we've built and land directly in the feeling we had at fifteen. Annie's resistance to the whole spectacle slowly giving way to genuine joy is both funny and unexpectedly moving, and the friendship that develops at the center of the story has real warmth and specificity. This is ideal reading for anyone who has ever loved something embarrassingly, lost track of it, and wondered whether it might be okay to want it back. Fans of Straub's previous work will find this her most purely pleasurable novel yet. Readers who responded to Taylor Jenkins Reid's Daisy Jones and The Six or the warm wit of Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It will be immediately at home.