Contemporary Fiction: The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston

8/10

Dear Reader, 

Clementine inherits a lovely apartment, an apartment with stories of time traveling. As a kid Clementine wished for the magical apartment to whisk her away years into the future, or years into the past, to place her in any time that wasn’t her own. Eventually, Clementine grew up and so left her innocence and her ability to believe in magic. 

At age 29, she moves into the apartment, the very one her aunt died in. She falls asleep and wakes up seven years in the past, when her aunt happened to be letting someone stay in her apartment. Iwan. The story is that the apartment will travel either seven years in the past or seven years in the future, and it will only do so when whomever is living in the apartment is at a crossroads. Clementine and Iwan quickly become friends, bonding over perfect meals and confusion of the matter of how they’re both at the apartment at the same time. Eventually, the past and present get muddled and thighs get complicated. 

This book was brought to my attention from a random youtube video I watched, by Haley Pham. She rated this book quite highly, so I decided to give it a whirl. Truthfully, the concept was interesting and kept me entertained. However, it wasn’t the romance I was expecting. Without revealing much of the ending or plot, it doesn’t make sense to me how they end up together. She barely knows him, but somehow after a few meetings with a past version of himself she’s ready to commit? 

I really wished she had a story with her aunt. If this had been a story of two women finding each other again after so many months having been lost, I think I would’ve loved it more. I think this could’ve been a beautiful story about womanhood, and about mourning or loss. Instead, we got a romance that didn’t entirely make sense by the end because there’s barely any communication/scenes between the two protagonists in the present day. 

With that said, the scenes that took place in the apartment were absolutely adorable, and the chemistry between Iwan and Clementine was great in them. I also loved everything we did see about her aunt, her death and life was incredibly moving and the rules she gave throughout the story felt worthy of following in real life. 

-Grace Sofia