After witnessing her teenage son kill a man she has never seen before, Jen finds herself further and further in the past each time she wakes up, and tries to understand what happened and why.
This time loop mystery not only keeps you guessing (well, I figured out the twists somewhere between pages 200 and 250, but it was still fun reading on to learn the “why” of things), it’s also a rather touching portrayal of how wonderful and difficult parenthood is.
Everything in parenthood feels so endless until it ceases.
They, mother and son, are a zipper, slowly separating as the years rush by.
The maternal habit of a lifetime, feeling guilty no matter which she chose.
Re-examining her relationships as she relives certain days from her past is just part of the investigating Jen performs while trying to understand what led to a stranger dead and her son in cuffs.
I do admit that several inconsistencies and oddities in the writing really got to me at times. Todd is described as pale in one scene, but then two days in the past he was tanned; he is said to have his father’s eyes and otherwise his features are all from his mother, but then later we read that he looks just like his father; a photograph of man with a shaved head is later described as a photograph of a man with light hair; the last time a certain day played out, we’re told both that Jen said something different to another character, but also that the last time it played out they never even saw each other. Jen’s husband has a tattoo of an inscribed date, the day he knew he loved her: “spring 2003” (that is a season, not a day); and a “quick, clean stab” resulted in three stab wounds. She assumed her son’s moodiness, secrecy, and weight loss were all just due to being a teenager; what could explain his recent bahavior: teenage rage, knife crime, gangs, or Antifa? I’m sorry, knife crime? That being included in that list just made me outright laugh.
Although it’s possible that some things I just misinterpreted due to differences in vernacular between British and American English (just as there was a lot of slang I wasn’t familiar with). They keep the office at 65 degrees, and whether that’s Celsius or Fahrenheit, either way seems too cold or much too hot. And she has a sofa in her kitchen at home, which Google tells me apparently is a thing, but just not a thing I can get on board with.
But despite these things, this was still a really engaging story, and I can recommend it without qualms to fans of thrillers and mysteries with a dash of sci-fi for flavor.
And for one last extremely relatable quote:
It’s useless to clean, she acknowledges, as she scrubs at the kitchen countertops and stacks the dishwasher. When she wakes up, yesterday, none of this will have been done, but isn’t that kind of always the way housework feels?
Jessica Crawford 