The Edge of Yesterday, by Rita Woods

[mrissa]

 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The premise of this book is that two upper middle class Black people from Detroit from a century apart can sometimes see and talk to each other through the expedient of Greer, a ballet dancer from 2025, going briefly back in time to 1925 and meeting Monty, a doctor. The parts of this book that are about upper middle class Black Detroit, in both eras, are great. Extremely well written, and if you have any fondness for Detroit at all (I do), you'll see some of the stuff you love there. Woods is herself a Black woman from Detroit, and this is a love letter to her community.

It's the science fiction side that lets me down, unfortunately. It's not that the science of it is handwaved, I'm totally fine with that. It's that the personal relationships are. Greer has a chronic illness that seems to be somehow related to the time jumps, but how is not clear, and that's the sort of thing that comes with pitfalls when you're writing about chronic illness. Sure enough, at one point Greer's best friend Leah chides her that she has to stop the time jumps because she's changing the timeline too much--but her control over them is very minimal--and Leah's logic is that Greer is being selfish in trying to find enough changes that she doesn't have a chronic illness, because what she has will not kill her. But...it's undiagnosed. It is a major plot point that this mystery illness is undiagnosed. So who knows whether it would kill her? Why is it not okay for Greer to want to not be debilitated? And also why is Leah so sure that the tiny interactions Greer has with the past--she doesn't, for example, warn Monty about the stock market crash or anything like that--are going in negative directions? None of this is fleshed out because it isn't Woods's focus.

At the very end, but only the very end, Greer is trapped in the past, unable to get back to her family, friends, or career. It's made very clear that she still suffers her chronic illness and dies with it. Meanwhile Monty...gets to pursue his restless dreams in Paris due to Greer's influence. So...the woman with the chronic illness is punished for having a largely volition-free interaction with this condition, but the able-bodied man gets to live his dreams because of it? I was not left feeling great about the ending to this book.

Comments

[anne]

Dancers do tend to prefer good health, for some unknown reason, I wonder what it could be.

[adrian_turtle]

Once upon a time, an angel spoke to Prince in a vision and offered him a choice. On the one hand, he could have a long life of good health and never dance again. On the other, he could dance, and die before he was 60. Maybe it was a devil, but Prince hardly paused to think about it.

[sovay]

Greer is trapped in the past, unable to get back to her family, friends, or career. It's made very clear that she still suffers her chronic illness and dies with it.

Is that meant to feel like a punch line? Because if so, ack.

[oursin]

And presumably more likely to die of it in the past without benefits of modern medicine to ameliorate if not actually cure.... (not to mention that the 1920s were a swirling pit of stuff she might have died of anyway, pre antibiotics etc).

[rachelmanija]

There are parts of this that appeal to me a lot. And I am not going to read it because I HATE the stuff that you hate.