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What it argues
Clementine inherits her aunt's apartment in New York City — an apartment with a particular enchantment: it occasionally slips into the past. Moving in after her aunt's sudden death, Clementine encounters Iwan, a man living in the same apartment seven years earlier, who doesn't yet know what's coming. They meet repeatedly across the time slip, falling into an intimacy that both know is impossible to sustain. Then Iwan appears in the present, now a stranger who looks like someone Clementine already knows and has already said goodbye to.
The novel is about grief wearing the costume of a love story. Clementine's aunt was the person who made everything make sense, and the loss is felt in the way she moves through the world after — at a remove from her own life, doing the work, managing the feelings of others, not managing her own. The magical apartment is a device for exploring what it means to love something you know you can't keep, and what it feels like when the past keeps arriving in your present.
What it gets right
- 1.
The time-slip device is used to explore grief specifically — the feeling that the past is more real and more inhabited than the present.
- 2.
Clementine manages everyone else's emotions at her job as a literary publicist while being completely unable to manage her own, which is a recognizable portrait of high-functioning grief.
- 3.
The relationship with Iwan in the past has a completeness that the present-day version can't easily replicate, and the novel is honest about that gap.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Ashley Poston is an American author known for contemporary romance and young adult fiction. She is the author of the Geekerella series, the Once Upon a Con series, and several adult contemporary novels including The Dead and the Dark and The Heart Principle. The Seven Year Slip became a bestseller and was widely praised on BookTok for its emotional treatment of grief. She lives in South Carolina. Her work is known for its warmth, its emotionally intelligent protagonists, and its use of slightly fantastical premises to explore real feelings.
