time for her book review

Pierre Alex Jeanty’s HER: Book Review

Pierre Alex Jeanty’s, HER joins a long tradition of male poets attempting to define the female mind and body, and like the long tradition before him, Jeanty falls short. Reductionistic descriptions of women and the destructive idealization of femininity is as old as poetry itself, but we don’t need to go far back to find examples of this reductionistic idealization of women.

For example, in “She Walks in Beauty Like the Night,” (George Gordon) Lord Byron writes about a woman who joined “all that’s best of dark and bright” in her eyes, behind which lie “pure” thoughts—because forbid she have an impure one! Byron’s woman is “a heart whose love is innocent,” and Jeanty’s woman is the modern version of this–pure by distinction. He writes: “You’re love blooming; / an exceptional woman growing roots / in a field of women who aspire to be / bad girls and heartless savages.” Ouch. I’m curious about how Jeanty’s “bad girls” act. Actually, I’d like to meet some of them. Even better, I wish they’d start writing poetry.

We get a pretty clear picture of who Jeanty’s “Her” really is. She’s been hurt, but open to love. She’s discerning in her selection of men. She’s a good girl who doesn’t forgive easily. She has a big heart, unlike those other women with “small hearts” who “do not leave room for love / once they’ve faced enough trial.” How much is “enough trial”? In a world where women are battered and emotionally abused, in a world where women are deemed unlikable for exhibiting human qualities like anger, what is Jeanty getting at exactly? And don’t you dare mistake her for aggressive! “She’s everything buy crazy. / They’ve mistaken her passion / for aggressiveness.” Let’s remember always that aggression painted differently can be called “assertive.” And assertive women aren’t liked. Oh yes, Jeanty’s woman also loves God.

Jeanty’s woman wants to be liked. Or at least, Jeanty wants to like his woman. I’m not sure which is true because Jeanty fails to lend his muse a psyche of her own, distinct from his. Roxane Gay writes that “in literature, as in life, the rules are all too often different for girls.” We tolerate unlikable men, but unlikeable women are exorcised. Gay makes the argument that unlikeable women are basically human, and Jeanty’s “Her” comes across as anything but human. “Her” is a caricature at best.

Jeanty can be incredibly patronizing, to the point of denigrating. About “Her” he writes: “She can be difficult. / There are times her words / will be heavy with stubbornness, / her tongue will be sharper than a new / sword, and her attitude like that of a two-year old.” Being called a two year old isn’t praise. It’s insulting. This is not a new theme in poetry. William Shakespeare reminded us that his “mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” Jeanty is a little more literal. His woman is “a poetry book. / You must read every letter / and digest every word.” Jeanty is at his most harmless in comparing his “Her” to a bad poetry book. To his credit, Jeanty returns to Shakespeare a few times, but misses the mark, going quite literal with, “The sunset cannot compare, dear.”

Roxane Gay wrote beautifully about our need for literary women to be “likeable” in her stunning essay “Not Here to Make Friends” from her book Bad Feminist. About her own supposed “unlikability” she writes: “I was being honest (admittedly, without tact), and I was being human. It is either a blessing or a curse that those are rarely likeable qualities in women.”

What’s fascinating about Jeanty’s HER is that we see a male mind working through our culture’s misogyny, and it isn’t always pretty. He writes about waiting for a woman’s forgiveness: “To demand that she acts like (sic) / it didn’t hurt / and put it easily in the past, / is to ask her to be a robot, / rather than a human who feels.” To quote Gay, “an unlikable woman embodies any number of unpleasing but entirely human characteristics.” I wish Jeanty’s Her would be read by teenage boys if only to hammer in the line that women are not robots, that the female body isn’t a place where they can project their desires whenever they wish. Sadly, I fear that Jeanty’s main audience is women.

Jeanty’s “Her” wants a man to make her his world. In Jeanty’s poetic world, a single woman is just waiting “until someone / comes to fulfill that position.” He cautions women against “treating boyfriends as princes” encouraging them to wait for a “husband.” After all, Jeanty reminds his woman that most men won’t want “your heart, / they are merely auditioning for other parts of you.” Forget sexual liberation or owning one’s own sexuality. Jeanty’s “Her” isn’t allowed to open her body without opening her heart, lest she be classed as another “heartless savage.” Let’s be clear, women’s bodies are their own and they can open up whatever they damn well please–heart or otherwise.

The problem with this kind of poetry is that it is so prescriptive as to be outright destructive. Though I have to admit I laughed out loud at this stanza: “She isn’t meant / to be handled / with caution, / but to be loved hard.” Perhaps Jeanty’s “Her” isn’t above some light BDSM? I don’t think he meant that line to be read metaphorically. This is problematic given that this is supposed to be a poetry book. When metaphors do arrive, they are cliché. Here’s a gem: “She is / the same as wine; / without patience, / you will never / see how much better / she gets with time.”

But then again, some of the best poetry thrives in paradox, and Jeanty has a few. Take this one: “She shouldn’t have to/ change to be a recipient/ of your love. / Only ask her to be yours, and / be by her side as she changes.” These moments come across as fumbles, not intentionally complex.

The best couplet in the whole book is this one: “She stays in shape because she is in love / with being a well-rounded person.” I’m a sucker for good puns, even in a bad book.

The gender roles presented in HER are problematic because they assume that the highest aim of a good woman is to be loved by a man. If this is the poetry that resonates most with women, then our culture still has a lot of work to do. If you’re looking for a good poem written by a man trying to write about a woman, and getting it wrong, but still killing, try Dante’s Divine Comedy or the Vita Nuova instead. A poet needs to do some hard introspection before trying to characterize anyone else. Dante surely does. Jeanty’s HER is missing that introspective spark, and therefore destructively falls flat.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

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Book Reviews

Barbra streisand's memoir shows she wasn't born a leading lady — she made herself one.

Brittany Luse

Barbra Streisand in her dressing room in October 1965. Harry Benson/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption

The season of the celebrity memoir is upon us. In just the past few months Britney Spears, Jada Pinkett Smith, Kerry Washington, and more have showered us with bombshells and revelations about their origin stories and private lives. Despite those heavy hitters and the crowded field they occupy, the celebrity memoir I've coveted most is that of the singular Ms. Barbra Streisand. Thanks to the opportunity to speak with her for this week's edition of It's Been A Minute , I was able to get my hands on a copy.

For me, the iconography of Streisand begins with her nails. More than the deeply parted bouffant of Streisand's early stardom, or the sleek bob she adopted in the '90s, or even the smoky chevrons of her signature cat eye, her elegant talons — all natural, by the way — are visual proof of Streisand's trademark steadfastness.

As the old story goes, when Streisand was a fledgling actor, her mother suggested she take typing classes to become a secretary in the New York school system. Streisand grew out her nails in refusal, went all in on show business, and the rest is history — though Streisand now concedes that the ability to type might have made book writing a bit easier.

Streisand's memoir, My Name Is Barbra , is nearly 1,000 pages of such gumption, her rhythmic Brooklyn cadence communicated via countless ellipses and more than a few pleasant divergences on her favorite kind of egg roll or a particularly good antique shopping trip. There was the time Streisand jumped in to offer a blocking cue to Robert Redford on the set of The Way We Were . And of course she informed the director of the best way to block herself for her Broadway debut at the tender age of 20.

Years later, when everyone from her agent to dozens of producers suggested Yentl was "too Jewish" to connect with mainstream audiences, she pressed on, eventually garnering five Academy Award nominations and one win for the film. The film took over 15 years to make, but ultimately Streisand's resolve won out. "I became what I wanted to be ... I don't want somebody telling me what I can't be," she told me.

Across the book's 59 chapters and many decades, Streisand is careful to uplift the names of those who encouraged, impressed, or even challenged her. Her detractors tend to be aired out or paid dust. She recounts her life as a series of odysseys, and she the ever triumphant victor.

Barbra Streisand in March 1966. Terry Fincher/Express/Getty Images hide caption

Barbra Streisand in March 1966.

Frankly, she's earned it. Her resumé is living legend: more than 50 albums, a box office titan, and a whole EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony for those unfamiliar). She was told to alter her features and change her name, and by not doing so, she redefined Hollywood notions of beauty and relatability. But even I've known the diva reputation that has followed her for decades and wanted to go there. "Divas, I don't think, come from Brooklyn," Streisand quipped to me, and yet the rumors persist. Sexism and misogyny are to blame, but there's also a fundamental misread of Streisand's artistry at play.

Our culture loves to see and persistently pause Streisand as Babs, the consummate prima donna, our forever leading lady. But in doing so, audiences, critics and biographers have failed to acknowledge the shrewd image-maker she has always been — the architect of her persona and performance.

In 1984, Streisand became the first woman to win the Golden Globe for Best Director for her work on Yentl , and still remains one of only three female winners in history. In 1996, her direction on The Mirror Has Two Faces led Lauren Bacall to the first Academy Award nomination in Bacall's then five-decade career. By the time all American women had won the right to open a credit card without a husband, Streisand had already founded two production companies. When I asked Streisand about her legacy as a trailblazing businesswoman, she insisted that her goal wasn't to become a mogul, but simply to serve her ultimate artistic vision. "I just never thought about, really, the business aspect. I just thought about it from the control aspect," she said.

And still, even as a devoted fan, I don't think I grasped the depth of Streisand's mastery until I saw a video of her that recently made the rounds on social media. It's a behind-the-scenes clip of an explosive scene from Yentl . Streisand is in a pixie-length wig topped with a yarmulke, seamlessly shifting gears between directing a screaming Mandy Patinkin, instructing the camera operator, and playing a key emotional moment in character. We don't see a diva, we see a genius.

Streisand's legacy still scatters like a constellation across our cultural landscape; Jane Campion's Oscar win, Lady Gaga's screen goddess turn, Beyoncé's Parkwood Entertainment. But artistic powerhouses like them, like Barbra, don't spring forth, fully formed. They're sharpened over years, one overnight shoot, one "let's take that again from the top," and one lengthy fingernail at a time. And in a society that tends to value women's passivity while lauding their accomplishments in hindsight, it's a distinct pleasure to look back with My Name Is Barbra and marvel at how the real she came to be.

Barbra Streisand performs in Philadelphia in October 2012. Jeff Fusco/Getty Images hide caption

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SOMETHING ABOUT HER

by Clementine Taylor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2023

Absent broader considerations, this is a standard-issue romance that will give casual readers what they want.

Two young women are drawn together into a budding romance and must overcome hurdles to be together.

When Maya, a Londoner, and Aisling, from County Clare, meet at a poetry club in Edinburgh, the two students are instantly attracted to one another. While Aisling has known she was a lesbian since a childhood friendship turned into a teenage relationship, Maya has just started dating her longtime crush, Ethan. The two young women grapple with their feelings separately—Maya questioning this sudden attraction to a woman and Aisling unclear of where she stands—as their friendship deepens. But once Maya ends things with Ethan to pursue a relationship, Aisling must confront the abuse she's endured from her conservative Catholic mother, who caught her with her girlfriend as a teen and continues to torment her emotionally and physically. While Taylor has a keen eye for building intimacy between characters, the plot quickly becomes predictable. What's more, set in 2013 and 2014, the novel lacks a broader context; Taylor stays focused tightly on Maya and Aisling and their families without interrogating how they fit into Irish and British culture. This is particularly disappointing in the case of Aisling and her mother's fraught relationship, which could have been the basis for an examination of Ireland's changing identity.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023

ISBN: 9780593544303

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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Pulitzer Prize Winner

DEMON COPPERHEAD

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

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June 27, 2023

Book Review: This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my links—at no extra cost to you. Please read full disclosure for more information.

This spoiler-free book review of This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub covers everything from the book’s main themes and plot to favorite quotes from This Time Tomorrow , frequently asked questions about the book and Emma Straub, book club discussion questions, similar books, other books by Emma Straub, and more!

Content warnings: Grief, death of a parent, parental abandonment, miscarriage mentioned, alcohol and drug use

This Time Tomorrow Book Review / Summary

• #1 National Bestseller

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub is definitely one of my favorite reads of 2023 . This is a sliding door time travel book about Alice, a forty-year-old woman who’s found her life has turned out a little differently than she expected.

Nothing is terrible—she has a decent job, and she’s not unhappy with her single/dating life. But her father is sick, and she can’t help but wonder if something’s missing .

Growing up, it was always Alice and her father—and her lifelong best friend. But now, on her fortieth birthday, her best friend is busy with her own family, her father is in the hospital, and nothing feels right.

After a solo night of drinking, Alice wakes up the next morning to find herself back in her childhood bedroom, in 1996, on the eve of her sixteenth birthday .

If you’ve ever wondered if there’s anything you would change if you could go back in time, you will be drawn to this book—and Alice’s decisions. As she relives her sixteenth birthday—and her high school crush!—she also sees her young, healthy father with new eyes, appreciating their relationship in the sweetest, most tender way .

This Time Tomorrow is a beautiful, heart-wrenching story about what we’re willing to do to preserve our most cherished moments.

It’s about nostalgia and learning to let go to appreciate what’s in front of you—how the bond between parent and child is elastic, softening and stretching out across years, changing with age and time.

My Thoughts on This Time Tomorrow

If we had the compassion and perspective to see our parents as individuals outside of their role as parents, would our love expand?

If we could go back to dreams we once had, knowing what we know now, would they spark anew? Fizzle out?

These are the questions that kept me turning pages. Emma Straub nailed it. I absolutely adored this book.

Father and Daughter Relationship

First, let me say I loved, loved, loved the father-daughter relationship. Emma Straub perfectly captures the dynamic between a loving father and daughter, without being overly saccharine or too heavy . I fell in love with Leonard and Alice separately, but seeing them together was absolute perfection.

One fascinating part of their dynamic was Leonard’s profession and fame. He was the author of Time Brothers , a famous time travel novel that was turned into a popular TV series.

Emma Straub’s Father

After I read This Time Tomorrow , I found out Emma Straub’s own father was famous horror writer Peter Straub. While he was in and out of the hospital in 2020, he jokingly suggested she write a book about a woman who visits her dad in the hospital.

When I learned how this book came to be and the grief Emma herself experienced, it all made sense why it struck a nerve. This Time Tomorrow and the relationship between Alice and Leonard is deeply intimate and real. There’s courage on the page, and it feels like a gift to be able to read her words in this way.

The Concept of Aging

There’s an aspect to aging that we don’t like to talk about or think about, really, and that’s preparing to lose loved ones in your life. As you get older, it becomes a thought experiment to consider the ripple effects.

What will it be like?

Will we be unanchored in a new way?

Will it change us so much we won’t recognize ourselves? This Time Tomorrow makes grief seem so tangible:

“She understood that it wasn’t actually something one could ever work all the way through, like a jigsaw puzzle or a Rubik’s cube; grief was something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the over, farther away from the window, but it was always there. . . . Alice thought that it was probably exactly the inverse, the mirror image, of how it felt to be pregnant, and to know that your life would never be the same. A subtraction instead of an addition.” —Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

There’s also the idea of returning to your youth and appreciating your young body in a new way. Emma Straub does such a good job peeling back the critical teenage mind, reminding us to view our bodies with kindness. And the idea of spending time with a loving parent at the same age you are now . . . oh, it’s just lovely, isn’t it?

Genre-Bending Fiction

Perhaps my favorite thing about This Time Tomorrow is Emma Straub’s whole approach to time travel. This isn’t a science fiction time travel story with complicated explanations.

It feels like literary fiction with a splash of magic—the real world with a magic portal to another time—a sliding door kind of time slip novel that is much more about emotions and character dynamics than plot or scientific logistics.

Don’t get me wrong, I love science fiction, but I was delighted to find a story focused on family and relationships that had time travel in it, not the other way around.

I loved how she left threads for the reader (ahem . . . how old was the cat, now?!). I mean, really . . . who doesn’t want 13 Going on 30 , but for adults?

Also, as an editor, I know how hard it is to write a time slip/alternate reality where you have one character returning as herself at different ages. I’ve worked on these types of books before. Emma Straub knocked it out of the park with this, in my opinion:

• “Alice was remembering more. It was like watching someone paint a giant canvas at high speed, all the white getting filled in with details.”
• “She remembered it now. Or part of her did. Alice felt aware of simultaneous thoughts, sort of like when you were driving cross-country and the local radio stations kept flipping back and forth as you moved in and out of range. Her vision was clear, but it was coming from two different feeds. Alice was herself, only herself, but she was both herself then and herself now. She was forty and she was sixteen.”

Favorite Quotes from This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

“Any story could be a comedy or a tragedy, depending on where you ended it. That was the magic, how the same story could be told an infinite number of ways. . . . Happy endings were too much for some people, false and cheap, but hope—hope was honest. Hope was good. —Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“It was the worst fact of parenthood, that what you did mattered so much more than anything you said.” —Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you. Transcendental meditation, maybe, but with hot dogs and the knowledge that everything would change, the good and the bad, and so you might as well appreciate the good.” —Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence. There should be several more distinctions: the idiocy of the young twenties, when one was suddenly expected to know how to do adult things; the panicked coupling of the mid- and late twenties, when marriages happened as quickly as a game of tag; the sitcom mom period, when you finally had enough food in your freezer to survive for a month if necessary; the school principal period, when you were no longer seen as a woman at all but just a vague nagging authority figure. If you were lucky, there was the late-in-life sexy Mrs. Robinson period, or an accomplished and powerful Meryl Streep period, followed, of course, by approximately two decades of old-crone-hood. . . . It wasn’t fair to call it a fountain of youth—nothing could make you feel ancient and crumbling faster than a cruel word from a teenager—but even so, being around young people kept the heart healthy and the mind open.” —Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“Teenage girls’ skeletons were half bones and half secrets that only other teenage girls knew.” —Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

Frequently Asked Questions about This Time Tomorrow

How many pages is this time tomorrow by emma straub.

This Time Tomorrow is 336 pages, published on May 16, 2023, from Penguin Publishing Group.

Who narrates This Time Tomorrow ?

My favorite narrator! Marin Ireland narrates This Time Tomorrow . <3

What kind of books does Emma Straub write?

Emma Straub writes mostly literary fiction, but she’s also written nonfiction stories and essays.

Who is Emily Straub’s father?

Emily Straub’s father was Peter Straub, horror and suspense novelist, who died in September 2022.

What is the book This Time Tomorrow about?

This Time Tomorrow is about a woman named Alice on her fortieth birthday. Confronted with the realities of her ailing father, Alice wonders how her life might have been different. When she wakes up the next day, she’s somehow stumbled back into 1996, on the eve of her sixteenth birthday.

What surprises her most—other than the obvious shock of her adolescent body and teenage crush—is her healthy, vibrant father, Leonard: a famous author of a time travel book that turned into a popular TV series during her childhood.

Does she try to alter the course of his life and save him? Will it even make a difference? This Time Tomorrow is about mortality, the parent-child relationship, and what it looks like to appreciate what’s right in front of you.

What genre is Emma Straub?

Mostly literary fiction, but Emma Straub also writes nonfiction and personal essays for a variety of publications.

RELATED: Happy Place: Review of Emily Henry’s New Book

Book Club Discussion Questions for This Time Tomorrow

• Ice breaker question: If you could travel back in time for a day, would you do it? If so, what day?
• One person Alice is excited to see again as her sixteen-year-old self is her high school crush, Tommy. Her feelings about him change throughout the course of the book. What does Alice learn about herself through her relationship with Tommy?
• Sammy and Alice are lifelong best friends, and Emma Straub shows different facets of their friendship through teenage years and adulthood. How did their friendship grow and change? What did you notice about their friendship?
• How did you feel about Leonard’s parenting style when Alice was young? How do you think it affected her as an adult?
• Alice is surrounded by teenagers all day at her place of work, Belvedere, the prestigious private school in New York City that she attended as a young girl. How does Alice’s perspective on youth, wealth, status, and Belvedere change when she returns to her teenage self?
• What did you like or dislike about the time travel element? What worked for you and/or what didn’t?
• How did you feel about the pivotal part of the book when Alice is desperately flip-flopping between her forty-year-old life and her sixteen-year-old life, trying to change the trajectory of her adult reality?

Other Books by Emma Straub

• Very Good Hats (picture book)
• All Adults Here
• Modern Lovers
• The Vacationers
• Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures
• Other People We Married

Aside from her books, Emma Straub has written several stories, essays, and anthologies for a number of publications.

Similar Books to This Time Tomorrow

These titles explore similar themes or are reminiscent of This Time Tomorrow in some way:

• In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
• Happy Place by Emily Henry
• Flying Solo by Linda Holmes
• Oona, Out of Order by Margarita Montimore
• Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Buy the Book

I recommend This Time Tomorrow if you already love time slip / alternate reality stories, and especially if you like to read about nostalgia and family dynamics. There are certainly heavier themes, but this is such an easy book to devour.

If you’re a sensitive reader or have recently experienced the death of a parent, I would tread lightly with this one. Emma Straub isn’t for everyone, but I am in love with her writing style. Let me know if you read it and love it, won’t you?

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Tamron Hall's new book is a compelling thriller, but leaves us wanting more

Jordan just wants some answers.

Tamron Hall's "Watch Where They Hide" (William Morrow, 246 pp, ★★½ out of four), out now, is a sequel to her 2021 mystery/thriller novel " As The Wicked Watch."

Both books follow Jordan Manning, a Chicago TV reporter who works the crime beat. In this installment, it’s 2009, and two years have passed since the events in the previous book. If you haven’t read that first novel yet, no worries, it's not required reading.

Jordan is investigating what happened to Marla Hancock, a missing mother of two from Indianapolis who may have traveled into Chicago. The police don’t seem to be particularly concerned about her disappearance, nor do her husband or best friend. But Marla’s sister, Shelly, is worried and reaches out to Jordan after seeing her on TV reporting on a domestic case.

As Jordan looks into Marla’s relationships and the circumstances surrounding the last moments anyone saw her, she becomes convinced something bad occurred. She has questions, and she wants the police to put more effort into the search, or even to just admit the mom is truly missing. The mystery deepens, taking sudden turns when confusing chat room messages and surveillance videos surface. What really happened to Marla?

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

The stories Jordan pursues have a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. Hall weaves in themes of race, class and gender bias as Jordan navigates her career ambitions and just living life as a young Black woman.

Hall, a longtime broadcast journalist and talk show host, is no stranger to television or investigative journalism and brings a rawness to Jordan Manning and a realness to the newsroom and news coverage in her novels.

Jordan is brilliant at her job, but also something of a vigilante.

Where no real journalist would dare to do what Jordan Manning does, Hall gives her main character no such ethical boundaries. Jordan often goes rogue on the cases she covers, looking into leads and pursuing suspects – more police investigator than investigative journalist.

Sometimes this works: Jordan is a fascinating protagonist, she’s bold, smart, stylish and unapologetically Black. She cares about her community and her work, and she wants to see justice done.

But sometimes it doesn’t. The plot is derailed at times by too much explanation for things that don’t matter and too little on the ones that do, muddying up understanding Jordan’s motivations.

The sudden narration changes from Jordan’s first person to a third-person Shelly, but only for a few chapters across the book, is jarring and perhaps unnecessary.

There are a lot of characters between this book and the previous one, often written about in the sort of painstaking detail that only a legacy journalist can provide, but the most interesting people in Jordan’s life – her news editor, her best friend, her police detective friend who saves her numerous times, her steadfast cameraman – are the ones who may appear on the page but don’t get as much context or time to shine.

The mysteries are fun, sure, but I’m left wishing we could spend more time unraveling Jordan, learning why she feels called to her craft in this way, and why the people who trust her or love her, do so. It's just like a journalist to be right in front of us, telling us about someone else's journey but not much of her own.

When the books focus like a sharpened lens on Jordan, those are the best parts. She’s the one we came to watch.

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7 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Writers writing about writers writing: It all gets a little hall-of-mirrors, sure, but that’s literary criticism for you. This week we recommend three books that look back at earlier eras of writing, from Marilynne Robinson’s luminous reflection on the Book of Genesis to Ramie Targoff’s survey of women writing in the 16th and 17th centuries to Tricia Romano’s oral history of The Village Voice.

Also up: an elegy for peasants and their way of life, and, in fiction, an Icelandic novel about an amnesiac, a British novel about a bride-to-be re-evaluating her life choices, and a South Korean story collection that tends toward the otherworldly. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS: How Women Wrote the Renaissance Ramie Targoff

Targoff’s rich excavation of writers of the 16th and early 17th centuries introduces not just four women but their work: fine poetry, ingenious translation, elegant diaries, subversive drama. Targoff brings a historian’s scope and a critic’s eye to her subject, and manages to make the result both enlightening and pleasurable.

“Fascinating. ... Targoff’s intent is to scrape away the layer of literary obscurity from Shakespeare’s sisters and present the pentimento as transcendent survivors. Their work indeed lives on.”

From Tina Brown’s review

Knopf | $33

READING GENESIS Marilynne Robinson

To read the first book of the Bible in Robinson’s company is a thrill. With exacting, benevolent intelligence, the prizewinning author of “Housekeeping,” “Gilead” and other novels (along with several previous works of nonfiction) brings marvelously to life this ancient chronicle of human longing, vice and virtue, and the awed intimations of divinity that inspired it.

“Its power lies in the particular reading it gives us of one of the world’s foundational texts, which is also one of the foundations of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s mind and faith.”

From Francis Spufford’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $29

PIGLET Lottie Hazell

Two weeks before her wedding, a young woman learns of her betrothed’s betrayal. She decides to proceed as planned — but will she be able to? Hazell’s debut novel is a tantalizing layer cake of horror, romance (sort of) and timely questions about the power of appetite.

“If I owned a bookstore, I’d hand-sell ‘Piglet’ to everyone. … Hazell’s prose is as tart and icy as lemon sorbet; her sentences are whipcord taut, drum tight.”

From Jennifer Weiner’s review

Holt | $27.99

THE FREAKS CAME OUT TO WRITE: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture Tricia Romano

Romano’s oral history of The Village Voice tracks its rise from a local New York paper to a muckraking powerhouse with national influence. Interviews with former staff members, admirers and a killer’s row of cultural critics capture the anarchic, audacious spirit of America’s most important alternative weekly.

“A well-made disco ball of a book — it’s big, discursive, ardent, intellectual and flecked with gossip. … May be the best history of a journalistic enterprise I’ve ever read.”

From Dwight Garner’s review

PublicAffairs | $35

REMEMBERING PEASANTS: A Personal History of a Vanished World Patrick Joyce

Most of the people who have lived on this planet since the invention of agriculture have been what we now call peasants. And yet, as Joyce writes in his sensitive rumination on agricultural laborers, it’s a state of being that’s always been treated with a total lack of respect. While Joyce, a historian, addresses most of Europe in this sweeping study, his investment is particular: In the process, he paints a moving portrait of his own family.

A “moving and sensitive rumination on the historic fate of these earthbound people. … Joyce’s study is an elegy for a way of life, and a way of understanding the world.”

From Fintan O’Toole’s review

Scribner | $30

YOUR ABSENCE IS DARKNESS Jon Kalman Stefansson

An amnesiac pieces together his identity from strangers’ stories in this peripatetic Icelandic novel, translated by Philip Roughton, which unfolds from an awakening in a small rural church into a rich history of a whole community. Stefansson uses the drama and comedy of everyday lives to dive into a broad range of topics: philosophy, music, faith and even the science of earthworms.

“Elemental nature and human tragedy are equally present. … Each story could stand on its own; one of the pleasures of the novel is the slow revelation of their connections.”

From Daniel Mason’s review

Biblioasis | Paperback, $19.95

YOUR UTOPIA: Stories Bora Chung

Chung’s new story collection, translated by Anton Hur, takes readers to otherworldly places and fantastical scenarios — ranging from an immortality research clinic to a version of Earth ravaged by a virus that causes cannibalism — to explore the very real quandaries we face as humans today.

“Chung builds out her stories with imagination, absurdity and a dry sense of humor, all applied with X-Acto knife precision.”

From Alexandra Kleeman’s review

Algonquin Books | Paperback, $18.99

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When the author Tommy Orange received an impassioned email from a teacher in the Bronx, he dropped everything to visit the students  who inspired it.

A few years ago, Harvard acquired the archive of Candida Royalle, a porn star turned pioneering director. Now, the collection has inspired a new book , challenging the conventional history of the sexual revolution.

Gabriel García Márquez wanted his final novel to be destroyed. Its publication this month  may stir questions about posthumous releases.

Tessa Hulls’s “Feeding Ghosts” chronicles how China’s history shaped her family. But first, she had to tackle some basics: Learn history. Learn Chinese. Learn how to draw comics.

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

• Entertainment
• Britney Spears Is Suspended Between Girlhood and Womanhood in <i>The Woman in Me</i>

Britney Spears Is Suspended Between Girlhood and Womanhood in The Woman in Me

Britney Spears knows what it means to be deprived of adulthood. As told in her highly anticipated memoir, The Woman in Me , hers is a tale of rapid maturity followed by arrested development, freedom followed by imprisonment. In the book, Spears likens herself to Benjamin Button, a character who ages backward through time.

Thrust into the limelight at just 16 years old with the 1998 single “...Baby One More Time,” Spears quickly broke the sales record for songs by female artists. Living and touring for her debut album without her family, she commanded the stage with the prowess of a pop star beyond her years. And yet as an adult, Spears found herself operating under an infantilizing conservatorship , primarily run by her father Jamie Spears. A court granted him the legal power to control his daughter's finances and personal life. For 13 years, he micromanaged her money, her diet, even her birth control . A judge finally ruled in 2021 that Spears could make her own decisions—that she could, essentially, function once again as an adult.

The Woman in Me , a copy of which TIME obtained ahead of its Oct. 24 release, marks the first time in well over a decade the public has heard extensively from Spears. Until now, the only insights into her recent life have been her 2021 testimony in court, when she asked for her conservatorship to be terminated, and occasional Instagram videos that fans have scrutinized for clues about her wellbeing. The buzzy memoir presents the facts of Spears' life in a strikingly straightforward manner, delivering even the most harrowing passages in a casual, conversational tone. By sharing her story in unemotional terms, Spears creates distance between herself and the childish, incapable image of her proliferated by her conservatorship, condemning the forces that paralyzed her between two stages of life. The story she tells in the book lends new resonance to the title of her famous song: "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman."

Read More: Britney Spears Reveals How She Feels About the #FreeBritney Movement in The Woman in Me

The book spends less time on Spears' early years at the top of the charts than it does the ones in which she endured the conservatorship that stripped her of her personal agency. Readers who hoped for granular details on the "Toxic" music video or a discussion of why there's a Titanic reference in "Oops!...I Did It Again" may be left disappointed. But what Spears does highlight from that period in the late 1990s is a sense of authority. When she first rose to fame, Spears wielded an impressive degree of creative control over her material for a teen, and she conceived some of the most memorable highs of her career herself. She writes that the school girl outfits in the "...Baby One More Time" video were her idea, as was the eventual collaboration with Madonna that manifested that famous 2003 VMAs kiss .

But while Spears presented herself as a fully matured pop star, she also describes herself throughout the book as having been trusting, naive, and eager to please. The public's interest in her sexuality—the way she was supposed to be sexy onstage and demure in her personal life—created an impossible bind. As a teenager thrust into the spotlight, she couldn't have predicted the backlash she would encounter for the clothes she wore on stage, the lyrics of her songs, and any hint that she was interested in sex. After an early performance of "...Baby One More Time" at an awards show, she recalls MTV sitting her down in front of a monitor and forcing her to watch strangers plucked off the street lambast her for the "skimpy outfit" she wore during the performance.

"The cameras were trained on me, waiting to see how I would react to this criticism, if I would take it well or if I would cry," she writes. "Did I do something wrong? I wondered. I’d just danced my heart out on the awards show."

The debate over Spears' modesty was, of course, a product of the era—in the early 2000s, tabloids and readers alike loved sorting pop stars into "Madonnas" and "whores." But Spears' own team exacerbated matters, she writes, by marketing her as a supposed virgin. In The Woman in Me , Spears expresses exasperation with this strategy, pointing out that in reality she'd lost her virginity at 14 and that embalming her image as a chaste teen stunted her ability to evolve as a woman in the public's imagination. Under the pressure of the pop machine that surrounded her, the masquerade continued into her early 20s, even when she was sharing a house with Justin Timberlake .

The consequences to Spears' personal life of the need to maintain her reputation as a virgin—even as she was hypersexualized by reporters who asked her whether her breasts were real—were tremendous. In one of the major revelations in the book, Spears writes that she had a medical abortion during her relationship with Timberlake. When she experienced excruciating pain after taking the pills she'd been prescribed, the couple did not go to the hospital for fear that the press would find out about their decision to terminate a pregnancy. Instead, Spears lay on her bathroom floor for hours in pain. She writes that the virgin persona became so burdensome that she was actually relieved when Timberlake, post-breakup, told the media that the couple had had sex.

Read More: Britney Spears Revisits Her 2003 Fling With Colin Farrell

Throughout the book, Spears describes attempts to act "grown up" that often manifested in play-acting at adulthood: drinking cocktails with her mother as a 13-year-old, smoking Virginia Slims at 14, even playing house with Timberlake between tour dates and ignoring rumors that he was cheating on her .

Real adulthood was far more harrowing. Her divorce from Kevin Federline and the fight over custody of their two sons, all chronicled by a press that hounded her and her children, amplified what the pop star now believes was a bout of postpartum depression. She admits in The Woman in Me to occasionally partying to escape during these years, though she emphasizes that she always arranged responsible child care and her drug of choice was Adderall, not the harder narcotics she witnessed other musicians regularly using.

The double standard was galling. Spears points out repeatedly throughout the book that male stars were permitted to show up late to events, to drink, to do drugs, to cheat—all without harming their image in the public eye. But if she committed such an infraction, she was deemed a bad mother and, eventually, incapable of functioning on her own.

In some of the most moving passages of the book, Spears writes how she found independence even in acts of desperation. She unpacks complicated feelings about shaving her head in 2007, an impulsive move after a plea to Federline to see her children went ignored. She writes that the decision "pains" her in retrospect, in part because the photos of the incident were leveraged against her by family members who wanted to prove she was out of control. But she also embraced it as a moment of empowerment.

"Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: F—k you," she writes. "You want me to be pretty for you? F—k you. You want me to be good for you? F—k you. You want me to be your dream girl? F—k you. I’d been the good girl for years. I’d smiled politely while TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents said I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top, while executives patted my hand condescendingly and second-guessed my career choices even though I’d sold millions of records, while my family acted like I was evil. And I was tired of it."

The conservatorship came soon after, the most dramatic version of infantilization that Spears faced. "The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child," she writes. The book consistently returns to Spears' conflicting sense of self in these moments: deprived of access to her children, she veered between two personas—powerless girl and enraged mama bear.

"Sometimes I just felt like a trapped adult woman who was pissed off all the time, " she writes. "This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom. There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl."

The struggle of that transition from girl to woman has become a popular theme in culture. Movies about literal puberty ( Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret .), emotional maturation ( Barbie ) , and the transition from innocence to sexual awakening (Oscar hopefuls Poor Things and Priscilla ) have dominated the box office. Those changes are often couched in metaphor (a doll becomes human) and end in triumph (reaching a biological milestone, an appointment with a gynecologist, escaping from a bad relationship).

But here Spears offers in the starkest possible terms the near-impossible challenges that she faced as she tried to make that transition.

Even the most devastating stories in The Woman in Me are delivered in a frank manner. During one of several stints in rehab foisted upon her by her father, Spears suddenly realized a striking parallel between herself and her grandmother Jean, a victim of abuse at the hands of her husband who lost a son and eventually died by suicide at that child's grave.

"For years I’d been on Prozac, but in the hospital they took me abruptly off it and put me on lithium, a dangerous drug that I did not want or need and that makes you extremely slow and lethargic," she writes. "My brain wasn’t working the way it used to. It wasn’t lost on me that lithium was the drug my grandmother Jean, who later committed suicide, had been put on in Mandeville."

Read More: Britney Spears Feared Her Family Would Kill Her, She Reveals in New Book

It's a harrowing observation, yet she leaves it at that. There's no extra paragraph analyzing the history of hospitalizing women for "hysteria" in the U.S., or even in her family, no meditation on how that revelation made her feel. Presumably Spears thought deeply about this presentation; a woman who in her estimation had been deemed incompetent by the press and her own family to the point of losing her freedom lays out the offenses against her in a way that's unassailable. She can't be accused of the unforgivable female sin of becoming "too emotional."

There are flashes of humor, despite the subject matter. As Spears is leaving the MTV taping in which she was forced to watch people criticize her sexy costumes, she wonders to herself, "I was never quite sure what all these critics thought I was supposed to be doing—a Bob Dylan impression? I was a teenage girl from the South. I signed my name with a heart." And Spears is more self-aware than most have given her credit for over the years. She adds, "I liked looking cute. Why did everyone treat me, even when I was a teenager, like I was dangerous?"

Still, moments of introspection are fleeting. The book leaves the reader with the sense that she hasn't yet totally figured out who she is. Ultimately, what is clear is that Britney Spears is a woman recovering from trauma. And we ought to give her the space to do so.

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Write to Eliana Dockterman at [email protected]

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Author Biography

Reading Christine Blasey Ford’s new memoir, I kept thinking of a tweet I read back in the spring of 2018, two months before President Donald Trump nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Can you name all 59 women who came forward against Cosby?” a user named Feminist Next Door posted. “Cool so we agree that women don’t make rape accusations to become famous.”

Ford, of course, did become famous after accusing Kavanaugh of attempting to sexually assault her while both were in high school (Kavanaugh has always denied this happened). She came to Washington, delivered a memorable testimony — “ indelible in the hippocampus ” — and then descended into the kind of fame that, as she describes in the book, “ One Way Back ,” nobody would ever wish upon themselves. Death threats forced her family into a hotel room for months. Bodyguards accompanied her children to school. A decades-old fear of enclosed spaces (a fear that first started, she says, after Kavanaugh’s alleged attack) was now paired with a fear of open spaces as strangers wrote to her: “We know where you live. We know where you work. We know where you eat. … Your life is over.”

Before coming forward, Ford describes a charmed existence. She had long ago traded the stuffy Beltway of her teenage years for laid-back California. She was a weekday psychology professor and a weekend surfer. When she saw Kavanaugh’s name on Trump’s shortlist, she prayed for the nomination to go to anyone else so that she could go back to packing up snacks and wet suits for her family at their beach house. Why did she risk all of this to go public? In Ford’s telling, she never imagined that her story would become so polarizing or so huge, and once it did, it was too late to change her mind. It felt like a surfing metaphor: Paddling out, she writes, “is the hardest part. And you never, ever paddle back in once you’re out there. You catch the wave. You wipe out if you have to.”

Readers looking to “One Way Back” for a magic bullet to prove Kavanaugh’s guilt or innocence are out of luck. Ford doesn’t remember anything more than she’s already publicly recalled; there are no new witnesses or unearthed diary entries. What she gives instead is a thoughtful exploration of what it feels like to become a main character in a major American reckoning — a woman tossed out to sea and learning that the water is shark-infested, or at the very least blooming with red tide.

At times, she comes across as either deeply optimistic or unfortunately naive. Prehearing, Ford’s legal team suggested that she sit through a “murder board” — a mock interrogation designed to stress-test her story. She decided that her truth should be protection enough, not comprehending that she was declining a fairly standard form of preparation.

She was told she could bring a handful of guests to act as a supportive presence while she testified, and she chose friends and colleagues over relatives — she and her husband decided he should stay home with their sons so that they didn’t have to miss school; she worried that the long hearing would be physically uncomfortable for her elderly parents. But when she saw Kavanaugh flanked by his wife and daughters at his own testimony, she realized she’d misunderstood a fundamental rule in the game of optics.

“I didn’t know my integrity was on the stand as much as Brett’s,” she writes. Kavanaugh looked like a wholesome family man. She looked like a renegade. She woke up to a headline in The Washington Post that read: “Christine Blasey Ford’s family has been nearly silent amid outpouring of support.”

Of course, it turned out that things were more complicated with her family than even she had realized. After Kavanaugh was confirmed, Ford’s legal team approached her with a delicate question: Is it possible that her dad sent a letter to Kavanaugh’s father — they belonged to the same golf club — saying that he was glad Kavanaugh had been confirmed? Ford couldn’t believe this was true, and when she asked her dad, he assured her no letter was written. It’s not until a later conversation that he backtracked: He didn’t write a letter, but he did send an email. “Just gentleman to gentleman,” he explained awkwardly. “I should have just said, ‘I’m glad this is over.’ That’s what I meant.”

Oddly, Ford did know what he meant, and in the context of her father’s Washington, it makes sense: He was an old-school Republican for whom manners and decorum supersede everything — a trade-school graduate who was proud to propel his family into a country club lifestyle and who wanted to make sure they would still be welcomed in that lifestyle even after all this tricky business with his daughter. But her father’s actions were utterly devastating in the new political climate, in which every word could be weaponized and every text or email was a gotcha. The pair’s relationship hasn’t fully recovered by the end of the book, and it’s hard to imagine it ever will.

Returning to California after the confirmation hearings, Ford was catapulted into a new reality. On the one hand, she was invited to dinner at the homes of Oprah Winfrey and Laurene Powell Jobs. On the other hand, these dinners were the only times she felt safe leaving her house, figuring that Oprah must have even more security than she did. On the one hand, backstage invitations at a Metallica concert. On the other, an anxiety so deep and pervasive that she spent days on end wrapped in a gray Ugg-brand blanket. From time to time, she writes, people still asked her whether she thought she ruined Kavanaugh’s life, and she reacted with incredulity: “Despite the fact that Brett ultimately got the job. Despite the fact that he sits on the Supreme Court while I still receive death threats.”

There are inspirational moments, too: for every death threat, a dozen well-wishers; for every moment of self-doubt, another moment of reminding herself that she’s coming from a place of privilege — supportive family, steady income — and that putting herself through the wringer might make it easier on the next victim, the next time.

Did it? Will it? “One Way Back” is a blisteringly personal memoir of a singular experience. But it was most piercing to me as a memoir of the past half-decade, when long-buried wounds were tried in the court of public opinion as much as in the court of law, and when sexual assault allegations were treated as though they were about scoring political points more than settling psychic trauma.

If you believed Ford in 2018, “One Way Back” will give you a deeper appreciation for the woman behind the headlines. If you didn’t — well, I don’t know if the book will change your mind. But it might wiggle your mind a little bit. Because it’s impossible to picture why someone would lie to achieve the kind of fame that has been bestowed upon Ford. It’s hard enough to picture why someone would put themself through that nightmare to tell the truth.

One Way Back

By Christine Blasey Ford

St. Martin’s. 320 pp. $29

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Review: Make time for astonishing debut ‘Nightcrawling’

This cover image released by Knopf shows “Nightcrawling” a novel by Leila Mottley. (Knopf via AP)

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“Nightcrawling” by Leila Mottley (Alfred A. Knopf)

“Nightcrawling” belongs near the top of any “best debut novel of 2022” list.

This is not an easy read. The words flow easily, with a visceral, in-your-face voice, but the subject matter is graphic and relentless.

The first-person narrator is Kiara Johnson, Ki for short, a 17-year-old young woman living in East Oakland, California. When we first meet Ki, she’s living with her slightly older brother, Marcus (he’s just 18), at an apartment complex called the Regal-Hi. Over time we learn why there are no parents in the picture, but it’s clear from page one that Ki is growing up fast, with no role models and no community support. In fact, she’s the one trying to help others — basically raising the 9-year-old son of her drug-addicted neighbor, Trevor, who wouldn’t get to the school bus stop or have anything to eat if Ki didn’t step up. Times are tough, to say the least, and when Ki wanders into a strip club hoping to apply for a bartender job, things get a whole lot tougher.

Mottley doesn’t shy away from what comes next. A customer assumes Ki is a prostitute, tells her he “knows a spot,” and in less than a page her “cheek is pressed to the cement” of the sidewalk. The rape is over in seconds and as Ki writes, ‘“I’m not even participating, just letting the sky soothe me as it happens… and yet it’s so dull I’m not ever sure I’m here.”

The events of the novel cascade after that as the title verb becomes Ki’s way of paying the rent. Her brother is lost in his own world, trying to make a rap album and follow in the footsteps of their rich Uncle Ty. After another sexual encounter with a smirking city cop who tells her prostitution is a misdemeanor, Ki finds herself repeatedly victimized by members of law enforcement, until an internal investigation reveals her name and she’s suddenly the star witness in a massive sexual exploitation scandal involving the Oakland Police Department.

Mottley’s writing style fits the story perfectly. Ki’s voice is so honest and vulnerable, even as she’s telling stories from the past when her family was at least partially intact and life didn’t seem so hopeless. “That was before I learned that life won’t give you reasons for none of it, that sometimes fathers disappear and little girls don’t make it to another birthday and mothers forget to be mothers,” she writes.

The novel would be completely bleak without a character named Alé, a friend of Ki’s who works at her parents’ restaurant and cooks for her at least once a week to keep her from starving to death. The evolution of that positive relationship serves as the counter to the depraved inhumanity Ki experiences on the streets.

Inspired by the true 2015 story of Oakland cops who sexually exploited a young woman, “Nightcrawling” heralds a bold new voice in fiction.