Published 2022
Time travels by a forty year old woman who desperately wants to find a way to save her father. Alice Stern and her dad Leonard are New Yorkers through and through. When the narrative begins Leonard is in the hospital and is unresponsive. Alice hasn’t been able to converse with him in weeks. She knows the end is near but is having trouble facing it. On her fortieth birthday she meets her best friend Sam for dinner, but the meal is cut short by an emergency involving Sam’s young son. Alice goes on to some of her favorite haunts, determined to have a big time on such a milestone. Forty years old, still single, still in the same apartment and the same job after more than a decade. Having had too much to drink she decides to go by her Dad’s place but can’t find her key to the house. She slips inside the old guardhouse, used now days to store gardening tools. Alice curls up inside and falls asleep. When she awakes, she is sixteen, it’s her birthday but twenty four years earlier. She’s in her old bedroom at home, and her Dad is in the kitchen having breakfast. Leonard doesn’t notice anything is amiss but Alice is both delighted and scared. Delighted that she has her Dad back, healthy and laughing, his old self. But scared that she’s losing her mind. She remembers a lot of things about that sixteenth birthday, where they went for lunch and her party later that night. As it turns out, the time travel lasts one day. When she gets back to her forty year old self, not much has changes. But Alice has plans. She begins travelling back and forth between her forty year old self and her sixteen year old self, hoping to change both her Dad’s life and her own so that she can hold onto him for longer. She wonders what would’ve happened if she had not let the love of her life get involved with another girl at her sixteenth birthday party. Would they have been happy? Will convincing her Dad to quit smoking keep him healthier longer? All these questions Alice has a chance to explore. By going back in time and changing just a few things, important things like taking care of yourself and speaking up for herself instead of letting things ride. How will this affect the years going forward.
It’s an interesting concept, not sure I agree with it but I enjoyed seeing how it turned out.