Review: Time and Time Again
Time and Time Again
by Chatham Greenfield
Bloomsbury, 2024
Phoebe Mendel has been living August 6th over and over again. Some days it’s not THAT bad, but when her IBS is flaring, it’s terrible. Still, she’s sort of settled into a routine and accepted her Groundhogs’ Day fate, despite it meaning she’s no closer to the appointment she has scheduled with a gastroenterologist she hopes will take her seriously instead of blaming her tummy troubles on her weight or her anxiety. It’s not that she isn’t also fat and anxious, but she knows neither of those is the reason she’s often doubled over on the toilet or curled up with a heating pad. So she’s just living August 6th over and over, trying to avoid IBS triggers, and spending time between her mom’s place and her dad’s.
But all that changes when her childhood bff/crush, Jess, a nonbinary lesbian with autoimmune arthritis, enters her time loop too. Over a matter of days (the same day, August 6th) the pair banter, flirt, and fall for each other while testing the bounds of both their shared time loop experience and their individual disability experiences.
The dialogue is charming and believable, as is the slow-burn romance. Phoebe and Jess are both such interesting and fun characters, and apart from the whole time loop thing, this reads like a contemporary YA romance rather than a sci-fi romp. My one small quibble is that the other characters, even some of the minor side characters, sometimes read as more fully fleshed out than protagonist Phoebe. At times I felt like I had a stronger sense of Phoebe’s anxiety or her IBS symptoms than the deeper emotions she was feeling, and that the portrayal of her love-interest Jess was more fully realized.
Jess and Phoebe’s Jewishness is an integral part of each of their identities, and their Judaism shows up in casual conversation throughout the book, whether the pair is comparing being stuck in a time loop to time spent in gehinnom (a Jewish, temporary but painful hell-like space, as Jess explains it, not to be thought of in the same way we consider the Christian version of hell) or joking about underage drinking wine at a Passover Seder. Phoebe and Jess also bond over the experience of feeling like outsiders because of their Jewish identity, and having experienced casual antisemitism.
In addition to their Jewish identities, the portrayals and explorations of living in a bigger body, navigating disability, and nuanced queer identities are really well written and complex, filling a gap in both Jewish literature and kidlit/yalit at large. There’s also some great representation of intersectional Jewish identities among the wider cast of characters, like Phoebe’s uncles Gabe and Adrian, a Gay, interracial Jewish couple. I also appreciated that Phoebe’s status as a patrilineal Jew never calls into question her Jewish identity, along with the representation of committed, engaged, Reform Jews whose relentless offering of chicken parm being a problem within the story not because of Kashrut issues, but because of IBS (which in itself is pretty dang Jewish). These examples of welcome and necessary representation reiterate the many, many ways of being Jewish, and drive home the idea that an individual's religious practice does not negate their identity or belonging. Ultimately, though, as much as I enjoyed this title, and think it’ll be enjoyed by Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, I’m not sure whether there’s quite enough Jewish content to make it a strong contender for a Sydney Taylor Book Award medal. To me, it’s more Jew-ish than Jewish…but hey, that’s for the real committee to decide!
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Reviewer Sylvie Shaffer (she/her) is a librarian, a kidlit scholar, and a writer living in Takoma Park MD with her wife, son, and mini-bernedoodle. She served on the 2019 and 2020 STBA committee, ALSC's 2018 Geisel committee, and AJL's inaugural Holiday Highlights committee.
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