If you watched Palm Springs on Prime and want more, this is going to be your catnip.
Plot: Barrett Bloom is starting university today, and thank god for that. High school was a nightmare, but this is her chance to reinvent herself as something other than an over eager student journalist who cost her school sport glory. Only she wakes up to the discovery that a friend who’d abandoned her over that story is her roommate, her professors seem unimpressed with her lack of preparation, no one wants to be her friend, and her high school work makes her unpalatable to the university’s newspaper. It is the worst day ever. And then she wakes up the next morning, and it is still that day. Even worse, the only other person who seems to remember that today has already happened is a stuck up jerk from her physics class who hates her on sight. Shenanigans ensue.
The groundhog day thing is basically its own trope now, and one of the hardest to get right. The repetition can get tedious, the narrative arc is often just thinly veiled pedantry about fixing your mistakes or whatever, the characters necessarily two dimensional because they’re all living the actual same day so only one person actually has any development of interest.
Solomon manages to avoid all these pitfalls. Barrett has built up a thick, thick skin after her whole school turned on her for daring to expose a cheating scheme propping up the school’s athletes. Even the teachers took the side of the cheaters. Miles has built up his own fortress of solitude and much like Barrett, is realizing he might be trapped inside. And each day, we get to see a different layer peeled off.
The actual groundhog day mechanism is fantastic. Solomon acknowledges through her characters that this is a well known trope and points out that this pop culture knowledge really does nothing to help you if you actually find yourself in a time loop. Physics doesn’t help a ton either, for that matter. There are some negative reviews over on goodreads about the ambiguity of how the mechanism is explained. For my money, the resolution could not have been better. Ambiguity isn’t always a bad thing, and particularly where to explain something would detract from the real point of the story.
So sit back and enjoy a story about second (and third, and fourth) chances at a first impression, about taking down protections that don’t serve you anymore, and about forgiveness.