"Sometimes, the worst day of your life happens, and you have to figure out how to live after it.

So Clementine forms a plan to keep her heart safe: work hard, find someone decent to love, and try to remember to chase the moon. The last one is silly and obviously metaphorical, but her aunt always told her that you needed at least one big dream to keep going. And for the last year, that plan has gone off without a hitch. Mostly. The love part is hard because she doesn’t want to get too close to anyone—she isn’t sure her heart can take it.

And then she finds a strange man standing in the kitchen of her late aunt’s apartment. A man with kind eyes and a Southern drawl and a taste for lemon pies. The kind of man that, before it all, she would’ve fallen head-over-heels for. And she might again.

Except, he exists in the past. Seven years ago, to be exact. And she, quite literally, lives seven years in his future.

Her aunt always said the apartment was a pinch in time, a place where moments blended together like watercolors. And Clementine knows that if she lets her heart fall, she’ll be doomed.

After all, love is never a matter of time—but a matter of timing."

Title: The Seven Year Slip

Author: Ashley Poston 

Narrated by: Brittany Pressley

Genre: NA Romance 

Tropes: Time travel, Magical realism, forced proximity, right person/wrong time

CW: Suicide, loss of a loved one, grief

 

This past month in April I joined a book club in Charlotte and the pick of the month was the Seven Year Slip. It wasn't on my immediate TBR but audible had given me two months free and I spend a lot of time in the car so I downloaded it and pressed play. I found myself entirely caught up in this book partly due to the development of the story and partly because of how Brittany embodies her characters. Even though I ended up giving this book four stars which I will talk about later, I did end up connecting with the quote from the very first page of the book from Clementine's aunt. If you follow me on IG you would have seen me post the screenshot of the first page of the book with the quote highlighted, and that's because I have always felt a strong connection to the theory that no matter where you are if you just look up you can see the moon and that connects two people who are apart. It is the same reason I feel such a strong connection to the song Moon by Jonah Kagen. 

Clementine is an overworked book publicist living her life on autopilot after losing her aunt. Growing up Clementine and her aunt went on spontaneous adventures where Analea taught her to always keep her passport renewed, to pair red wines with meats and whites with everything else, to find work that is fulfilling to your heart as well as your head, to fall in love whenever you can find it, and to always chase the moon. After inheriting her aunt's apartment Clementine comes home one day to find a man, a chef named Iwan, from seven years in the past. As the story progresses, Clementine finds herself falling for this man from seven years ago and she has to make decisions as she discovers neither she nor Iwan are the same seven years in the future. 

One of the things I think that the author did well was transition back and forth between the past and the present. The story did have an incredibly slow burn for the first third of the book but once the story and the characters start to develop then so does the entire book. I think the biggest struggle for me with this book and the reason I gave it four stars was that I felt disconnected from the grief aspect of the book, granted everyone grieves differently but it felt lost on me. Some parts of this story were incredibly predictable while other parts left me quite literally gasping out loud, but I did find myself rooting for Iwan and Lemon. Overall, I think this book had great banter, good character development, and a range of emotional content to keep readers engaged past the first third of the book. I also believe some readers might struggle with the slow burn in first part of the book, the lack of warning surround the death of the aunt, and the insta-love feeling from the characters.