The Seven Year Slip | Ashley Poston

 "these was something just so reassuring about books. they had beginnings and middles and ends, and if you didn't like a part, you could skip to the next chapter. if someone died, you could stop on the last page before, and they'd live on..."

    What to say about this book that has kept me up at night, a book I devoured and would love to read for the first time a hundred times more? It's the second Ashley Poston novel that I picked up and I will be reading everything she puts out without question. It has touched something in me, I truly cannot believe how much of myself I saw in these characters that are nothing like me, an yet...

    Clementine has inherited her late aunt's apartment in New York, but the quirk she was never told about is that it has the power to take you back 7 years into the past. Still grieving the loss of a person who has meant so much to her, one day Clementine finds a young man in her apartment. Iwan claims he was allowed to crash by her aunt who is on a Europe summer trip with her niece. Confounded and angry at first, Clementine is soon confronted with the truth of what is happening when she goes back to her apartment the next day and Iwan, and her aunt's furniture, aren't there. But she keeps sporadically being taken back to him and a deep connection forges with this sensitive soul who has big dreams and calls her Lemon.

    Complications arise when the publishing company she woks at is courting a chef to publish for them - the rising star James - and she realizes she knows him, though he seems to draw a blank on her. It's Iwan, seven years older, seven years removed from her, and she is stumped on what to do. He seems to have changed so much, lost so much of himself and sharpened in order to fit in with the expectations placed on him.

    Can Iwan and Lemon come back to each other? Have Clementine and James truly lost these integral parts of themselves or are they just buried under grief and sadness, hidden out of sight so they'd be able to go through life painlessly? As they navigate their relationship in the present and Clementine struggles with not revealing things to Iwan in the past - as well as with the inevitable loss of her aunt, they both come out of it wiser and stronger, ready to be in love.