Every day for Tara is the 18th of November — and after a hundred repetitions, curiosity becomes resignation.
This was a book of two halves. Initially, I appreciated the fresh take on a familiar novum. Rather than the heroic solutionising or the exploitation seen with many male protagonists caught in a time loop, Tara takes it slow. She returns home and lives with the experience for a while. She’s humble, she’s mindful, she finds beauty in the minutiae of life, the trivial details her existence is built from. It recalled Georgia O’Keeffe repeatedly painting her mountain to explore every aspect of it.
The prose is conversational, her days are quotidian – food, rain, birds. Where I’d panic, she seems slightly stunned, in no hurry, hoping it will just work out. Even when she knuckles down to figure it out, it’s half-hearted, just Tara and her husband in the confines of her house with a whiteboard, a kind of Möbius bottle episode.
When she fails to understand it, she fully embraces the situation, and the novel doubles down on the introspection, the interiority — action becoming almost entirely absent.
By the midpoint, I was desperate for fresh momentum or conflict, something other than mundane repetition, but the time loop plot was reduced to a metaphor that lets us experience the loneliness of growing apart from your partner: as Tara changed, her husband stayed the same.
My fondness for the spare prose faded as the narrative stalled, and I was bored. The overuse of enumeration, the intrusive narrator, and short, cyclic journal entries, shattered the meditative trance and left me with the frustration of hearing someone recount their mundane recurring dream.
This is not SF, this is literary fiction with an SF premise. People will love this as a mood piece, but what began as a five-star read finished as a death march to two stars. Much like my recent read of The Memory Police, the novel’s extended meditation on the quotidian through repetition and introspection was ultimately self-defeating at this length, diluting its impact without adding deeper meaning.
