The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️🌟 4.75/5

🔲 DNF’d

🔲 Don’t bother

🔲 Would recommend

✅ +TBR ASAP!

🔲 I will re-read

Published by Penguin Audio June 27, 2023

Genre: Magical Realism Romance

Tropes: Right Person, Wrong Time

🌶️ 3/5 open door, only mildly explicit and there’s only a few scenes

📖 Length: 9 hours,  43 minutes or 368 pages

⚠️ Trigger warnings: death, suicide, death of a parental figure, grief, overdose, accidental overdose, mental illness

🤓 SUMMARY 🤓 

Clementine inherits the apartment of her late beloved aunt and soon learns that the stories of its magic are true when she wakes one morning to find someone else in her apartment from seven years in the past.

👀 REVIEW 👀 

I loved this book! The banter (romantic and platonic) is so fun and cute, and I giggled out loud more than once. As usual, I was occasionally annoyed by the FMC making assumptions, but overall, the premise was creative and exciting, the pace was quick without feeling rushed, and the romance kept me sucked in. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who likes a good right-person-wrong-place, magical realism love story with a happy but realistic ending.

I was a little disappointed in the lack of diversity– while Drew and Fiona are a married lesbian couple having a baby (sexuality assumed, could be bi-, pan-, etc.), Miguel and possibly Issa seem to be the only people of color (Latinx or black), and it seems that Clementine, Analea, Iwan, and Vera, the biggest players of the story, are all white. Even lesser characters like Rhonda, Juliette, Clementine’s parents, and the doorman Earl are not specified as diverse. I understand that we don’t need to describe the ethnicity of every character we meet in a story, representation matters and subtle nods toward diverse races can add so much to a cast.

I also found myself thinking, “WE GET IT,” several times as Clementine repeated rules again and again. While very central to the plot of the book, I think maybe 2 or three mentions would have been sufficient. I’d actually be interested to see how many times they are brought up.

I don’t want to spoil what took most of the book to learn about Analea’s death, but Poston does a great job of making grief relatable and honest without bringing the mood of the entire book down. She addresses it very well in the epilogue as well, really connecting the story to real life.

The burn was sufficiently slow without being agonizing, the spice was open door but not so steamy to make me blush in public (no judgement if that’s your vibe), and the MMC was a welcome combo of soft, playful, and sweet in the current sea of borders-on-abusive men I see in lots of popular works these days (again, no judgement, this is a safe space where we do not kink shame).