As always, Straub creates characters who feel fully alive, exploring the subtleties of their thoughts, feelings, and relationships. As she moves through her day, she tries to figure out how to get back to her life as a 40-year-old and whether there's anything she can do in the past to improve her future-and save her father's life. Straub's novel has echoes of Thornton Wilder's play Our Town: Every prosaic detail of her earlier life is almost unbearably poignant to Alice, and the chance to spend time with her father is priceless.

After a drunken birthday evening with Sam, Alice returns to her childhood house on Pomander Walk, a one-block-long gated street running between two avenues on the UWS-but when she wakes up the next morning, she hears Leonard in the kitchen and finds herself heading off to SAT tutoring and preparing for her 16th birthday party that night. But now Leonard is in a coma, and as she visits him in the hospital every day, Alice is forced to reckon with her life. Alice's mother left her and Leonard when Alice was a kid, and father and daughter formed a tight, loving unit along with their freakishly long-lived cat, Ursula. She lives in a studio apartment in Brooklyn has a job in the admissions office of the Upper West Side private school she attended as a kid still hangs out with Sam, her childhood best friend and has a great relationship with her father, Leonard, the famous author of a time-travel novel, Time Brothers.

A woman who's been drifting through life wakes up the morning after her 40th birthday to discover that she's just turned 16 again.Īlice Stern wouldn't say she's unhappy.

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