What is The Seven Year Slip about?

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.

Poston writes contemporary romance with genuine craft. The New York setting is specific and affectionate — the Manhattan apartment, the food industry, the particular textures of the city — without being the kind of New York fantasy that looks nothing like actual New York. Iwan is a convincing romantic lead: charming and specific and clearly shaped by experiences the reader watches him not yet have. The emotional engine is Clementine's grief, and Poston understands that grief makes people complicated rather than simply sad.

This is not a hard book. It is warm and well-constructed and emotionally sincere, and it knows what it is. Readers who want formal complexity, psychological ambiguity, or romance that interrogates the genre will need to look elsewhere. Readers who want a book that makes them cry in a way that feels earned — that uses a magical premise to get at something real about loss and love and the impossibility of going back — will find this very satisfying.