The Seven Year Slip

I read exactly one romance before that had a time travel twist and I really did not enjoy its inclusion. That book was One Last Stop and it was a competent and entertaining enough romance but it was all revolving around the time travel gimmick of one of the two love interests being stuck in the New York City underground. The author had no idea how to resolve the issue really as they had no interest in putting in the work that a convincing time travel story requires (since their logic is as easy to break as they are hard to believe) and simply hand waved a happily ever after in the last chapter. It wasn’t offensively bad, the gimmick did its job to raise the stakes of the romance but its resolution was predictably underwhelming.

The Seven Year Slip follows the same structure; it uses its time travel gimmick well but doesn’t really know what to do with it afterwards and it’s just pushed to the side as just a quirky little thing. Clementine inherits an apartment that exists out of time whereby it semi randomly teleports her back 7 years and in doing so can meet anyone who was in the apartment at that time. This is something she is told about her aunt as a child and only realises to be real after her aunt’s passing and she takes the news surprisingly well. There is never any questioning about what this means in terms of magic existing or why this flat or even the smallest desire to tell anyone about it; the flat time travels, that’s it, take it for granted and don’t ask questions. I’d have been fine with that if the book didn’t end with Clementine selling the flat which is a bit odd given that the next owner will probably have some questions…it also brings up the issue of Clementine possibly magically forming new memories when her past self gets to meet whoever will be around the apartment 7 years from the end of the book but again the author isn’t interested in that. Time travel here is a romance gimmick and it shouldn’t be questioned past that.

The romance unfortunately isn’t great either and I’d struggle to qualify this book as a real romance story. Iwan and Clementine meet through the time travel flat and have one weekend together after which they’re both wildly in love with each other although they will not say so. Both because they made the decision to not tell each other about the whole 7 year time travel thing, so they both assume that the other one doesn’t know and avoid the subject and and boy how I love romances hinging on the “I won’t communicate” trope…ha…ha…haaaa. This is doubly weird for Clementine whose aunt explicitly told her about how during her time travel she had an open discussion with the other person about the whole thing. It’s also unfortunate that that communication would have made the story a lot more interesting, instead over the course of almost 10 chapters we go through each moment of that first weekend and it’s cute but it’s also kind of boring as not much happens and both of them only being able to interact within the flat really limits what they can get up to. And yes that means that one of the things they get up to is lots of kissing and having sex and it honestly doesn’t feel that earned because they spent one weekend together and don’t seem that much in common either, so it really confuses me why they would have the hots for each other aside from both being conventionally physically attractive which is a very boring romance motivator.

Outside of her love apartment Clementine is a book publicist and hangs out with her painfully cliché lesbian couple friends. There’s still not much positive I can say there either, Clementine’s friends and work colleagues are unbearable with countless tik tok, instagram, pop artists that will be forgotten in 2 years references which gives it both that cheap Gen-Z TikTok sensation book vibe and the “It’s only Sainsbury’s but it’s Taste the Difference” problem whilst also anchoring it so solidly in 2023 that 5 years from now this book will feel more dated than an Agatha Christie novel. It’s unfair for me to hold it against the book’s writing so I won’t but I’ll still point out that it definitely didn’t help that the voice actress for the audiobook also sounded like the TikTok text-to-speech voice.

What I will hold against the book’s writing though is that Clementine isn’t enjoying her work. I’m fairly sure this is meant to either be some sort of surprising reveal or a slow discovery throughout the book but the author immediately starts having Clementine make dozens of aggressive hints about how she doesn’t want to leave anything at her workplace so she can leave easily, how she is forcing herself into her work because of her aunt’s passing, how she has no passion for the work that she’s doing, how she wishes she had the drive that her coworkers have, etc. So when the curtain drops that she is handing her resignation to find herself, my only reaction was “well duh took you long enough”. I must say, I do relate to Clementine, I understand her character struggling to come to terms with the idea that she has to make a radical change in her life because that is something I struggle with but that doesn’t make the way it is written any better, so good motivation, terrible way of writing about it. Continuing on with the writing issues, the book is awfully repetitive, I have never seen such a density of the words “her robin egg blue chair” and I spent the first half of the book wondering where this attention to the chair would lead because no editor would leave that level of repetition in without good reason…

…and that’s where the book did something I did not see coming and I’m still amazed that an author who writes with so little maturity and subtlety managed this: it reveals that Clementine’s aunt died by suicide. Suddenly, the repetitions make sense, Clementine is focusing on the small things that she remembers her aunt by, one of which is that robin egg blue chair. Clementine is also struggling with feelings of guilt for not having seen it coming, feelings of abandonment in regards to her aunt’s “selfish” decision and feelings of love for her aunt who is now gone. It adds to Clementine’s struggle to discover that she wants to quit her job because she is at a very fragile moment of her life and the stability and consistency of her job gives her that feeling of security whilst in her off time she focuses on her memories of her aunt to not have to confront the fact that new memories will not be made with her anymore. It is such a small part of the book but it is genuinely amazing how well that part is written and it really sucks that I will not be positive on the book overall because it’s not enough to offset how uninteresting it is otherwise but it’s still a positive that I needed to give the praise it deserves.

Back to the romance and the mediocre bits, through her job, Clementine meets current day (or 7 years older) Iwan and they have some awkward conversation, some semi romantic date, they eventually argue about how much Iwan has changed and how shocked Clementine is (wow you’ve known the guy for one full weekend and you expect to know everything about him and are surprised he changed over 7 years), but really Clementine is projecting her unhappiness and quits her job and now they’re in love and everything’s fine. One thing left to do, Clementine has to say goodbye to 7 years past Iwan and that part again is actually quite decent. There is a feeling of finality close to a last goodbye before death situation. Past Iwan will have to go on on his own for the next 7 years until he gets to become current Iwan to be with Clementine and it’s very bittersweet because from Clementine’s perspective it all happens instantly but from Iwan’s perspective these 7 years will feel very long.

It’s fine, it really is painfully fine, I wouldn’t read it again. The romance really doesn’t have enough substance and the rest of the writing mediocre at best with the one exception of how Clementine deals with her aunt’s passing.