The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
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Sometimes, the worst day of your life happens, and you have to figure out how to live after it.
I noticed The Seven Year Slip received a lot of hype online several years ago, and I've learned my lesson by now: I apparently have very different preferences from the majority of people who hype certain books. 😂 So I put this one on my wishlist and waited until Play Books reduced the price by 70% a few months ago. Of course, as someone who loves buying books, I bought it.
Then one day, I had an hour to kill while waiting to pick up my daughter, but I forgot to bring a book with me. So I opened The Seven Year Slip on my phone.
Well, I didn't really have any expectations, but the time-slip premise mainly intrigued me.
The book starts in the present, in a Upper East Side apartment in New York. Clementine, a 29-year-old woman, moved into the apartment several months ago, but she's struggling to actually make it feel like home. Instead, she works constantly, and the apartment is basically just a place for her to crash at night.
The apartment was left to her by her late aunt, who passed away six months earlier. Clementine is in the middle of grieving, so she has built a fortress around herself to numb her feelings. Even when her boyfriend breaks up with her, she feels almost nothing.
Then one day, while sleeping on the sofa in her apartment, someone walks through the door and wakes her up. Panicked by the presence of a grown man in her own apartment, she attacks him—only to realize that most of the furniture and interior are completely different.
The man explains that he is subletting the apartment from Clementine's aunt. But how is that possible when her aunt has been dead for six months?
Then Clementine remembers something her aunt told her when she was a child: the apartment has a little bit of magic. It can transport people several years into the past.
Flabbergasted, she realizes that the apartment is exactly as it was seven years ago, when she was traveling around the globe with her aunt.
Yes. She has just time-slipped seven years into the past.
The man is Iwan, an aspiring chef. He needs a place to stay for several weeks while applying for a job as a dishwasher at a nearby restaurant.
Iwan is perfect: handsome, with dreamy eyes (which the author describes in many different ways, many times), and a gentlemanly attitude. He's funny and has a dream as big as the ocean.
They share a meal that Iwan cooks, and later decide that it's ridiculous for one of them to sleep on the sofa. They're both adults, capable and responsible enough to sleep in the same bed without doing anything other than sleeping.
And then, of course, the time slip ends according to the apartment's own rules. Clementine is sent back to the present, where her career is almost at its peak. She still can't believe what just happened, but she can't afford to lose focus right now.
Of course, they meet again in the present. But present-day Iwan is not the same Iwan she met in the past. And when the time is right, the apartment sends Clementine back and forth between the past and present.
Premise-wise, I think the time-slip is well executed and has a lot of potential. Ashley Poston tries to create a complete causal loop without obvious holes. The crossovers between past and present are tightly connected to Clementine and Iwan's lives and futures. Although I did have one minor disagreement with the time-travel logic: Iwan giving Clementine a hint about her future career felt a little questionable to me. 😂
The book also carries several heavy themes beyond romance, which remains the main focus. Grief is obviously one of them, and the author has since talked about how the book became personal to her after experiencing her own loss. Self-discovery also takes up a large part of Clementine's journey.
There is so much potential here, but I felt that some of these themes could have been explored more deeply.
Clementine's grief, in particular, felt more told than felt. She's dealing with enormous sadness and has essentially shut down her emotions, burying herself in work—but much of that is explained to us rather than shown through her behavior and inner life.
Then she meets Iwan, and the romance takes over.
For someone who has built her walls so high, Clementine becomes physically comfortable with Iwan surprisingly quickly. The emotional intimacy, to me, doesn't quite keep pace with the physical intimacy.
And this is where I struggled with their romance the most.
I don't really understand why they fall in love so deeply, so quickly.
Yes, Iwan is handsome, kind, funny, and idealistic. He reminds Clementine of someone who is still pure and full of possibility. But what, specifically, makes Clementine fall so deeply in love with him?
And then, what makes Iwan fall so deeply in love with Clementine?
She's witty. She's hardworking. She paints beautifully. I'm sure she's beautiful too, although I honestly don't remember the book giving her physical appearance nearly as much attention as it gives Iwan's. 😂
The two of them have a more complicated history than it initially seems, especially once the taxi encounter and the causal loop are taken into account. So I don't think the problem is that they literally have no history.
Rather, I didn't feel that the novel gave me enough emotional or psychological intimacy to make their love feel fully earned.
I enjoyed the dialogue much more than the prose. The conversations felt natural and funny, while the narration sometimes leaned a little too heavily into lyrical romance—repeating certain images and emotional beats until they lost their effect. At times, the prose felt slightly overwritten to me: it reaches for something poetic, but some of the imagery becomes familiar or repetitive rather than more poignant.
I also felt that some of the heavier themes—grief, self-discovery, and learning to stand up for yourself—sometimes felt more like accessories to the romance rather than fully integrated parts of the story. The book has a lot of interesting ideas, but the narrative attention repeatedly returns to the romance, especially the physical and romantic aspects of Clementine and Iwan's relationship.
Also, yes, the book successfully completes the cycle of Iwan and Clementine's self-development, especially Clementine's. The conversation between Clementine and her parents toward the end provides some of the answers to why her journey matters.
Overall, I actually enjoyed reading this book. Compared to some other hyped books I've read, The Seven Year Slip is genuinely an easy and enjoyable read, and I can understand why so many people loved it.
My biggest takeaway, though, is that I wish the author had dug deeper into the emotional side of the story. There is so much potential in the premise, especially with grief, self-discovery, and the complicated relationship between time, memory, and love. I just wanted to feel those things more deeply.
The premise is clever, the time-slip mechanism is well executed, and the dialogue is fun. I simply wish the emotional depth had matched the potential of the story.
Still, it's not a bad book at all. It's just not quite my cup of tea.
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