Oh, this was a good one! I really enjoyed the characters and the time travel aspect, and all the emotions! I laughed, I cried, I raged, I sympathized. It was really wonderful. And even though the actual time travel wasn't completely understandable/fleshed out, it was still really great. I loved Greer and Monty as characters, and I especially enjoyed watching them navigate each others' times.

My only minor qualm was that I wanted a bit more from the ending. There was so much emotional lead-up, and the ending felt a little flat for me. But overall, I really enjoyed the story, and absolutely highly recommend!

A woman finds herself time traveling to her own city a century earlier. As she grapples with the effects her travel has on her current life, she must figure out how to manage the changes without losing everything. Author Rita Woods tries to give readers a historical perspective through time travel in a book that ultimately doesn’t succeed in her newest novel The Edge of Yesterday.

For ballerina Greer Coffey in 2025, life is over. Once a principal dancer with a Harlem ballet company, now all Greer can do is get out of bed in the morning and cross her New York apartment without collapsing. A mysterious illness has robbed her of her ability to dance, and even though her husband, Sebastian, or Bass, has tried to be supportive and understanding, Greer can sense the tension mounting between them.

Bass suggests moving back home to Detroit, and Greer agrees with the utmost of reluctance. When they return, and Bass jumps right back into his family business. For Greer, though, it’s not that simple. Yes, she has her childhood best friend, Leah, and her police commissioner dad has made it clear that his door is always open, but Greer is mourning the loss of dance. Her one true passion is gone forever.

In Detroit in 1925, physician Montgomery “Monty” Gray is preparing to marry his childhood best friend. His family is a part of the Talented Tenth, that most elite group of Black families dedicated to lifting up the entire Black population of Detroit through their connections and means. Monty, though, feels trapped. What he’s always wanted to do is compose and play music. With racial tension simmering, there isn’t much time for “trivial” pursuits.

On a night when he wants a break, Monty goes for a walk and discovers a woman wearing strange clothes in the middle of the street. She says her name is Greer and that she’s from the year 2025. Monty scoffs, thinking she might be a little touched in the head, but when the incident repeats several times, Monty knows neither of them are crazy.

Both are caught in some strange time vortex that allows Greer to visit Monty but not the other way around. As they share the similarities and differences of each of their versions of Detroit, Greer and Monty form an unlikely friendship that will force them to make choices with permanent consequences.

Author Rita Woods aims to balance the Detroit of the mid-1920s with Detroit in the present day in a novel that doesn’t do justice to either. Both Greer and Monty are fairly passive as protagonists of their own storylines. Neither of them takes decisive action to figure out why they’re time traveling, how to make the most of it, or even how to end it. Greer gets a secondhand explanation as to the potential causes of the time travel but never seeks answers herself, letting someone else do the investigative work on that end of the story.

The book takes too long to get into the crux of the main plot device of time travel. Several chapters go by with both Greer and Monty’s thoughts on their current states in life and why they’re unhappy before finally bringing the sci-fi element into the mix. Author Woods’s intentions to highlight the Motor City seem sincere; the book, however, doesn’t cover nearly enough of it in either timeline, a shame given the many easy plot choices history offers.

Once the time traveling does start, Monty and Greer go back to being their passive selves. Monty does ask Greer questions about the state of race relations in 2025, but he’s willing to accept her hesitant answers without pressing for more. Greer, too, only does a cursory web search of Monty before returning to her unhappy self.

Their conversations about the two timelines are glossed over, and neither seems to want to dig into the history of either version of Detroit. These missed opportunities become glaringly obvious in the sloppy ending that leaves too many questions unanswered. The supporting characters almost feel like afterthoughts; one off-screen character is mentioned in Greer’s sections, only to disappear from mention or memory until the very end. Some readers may struggle to remember who that person is and then realize the character doesn’t have much to do anyway.

The plot offers the opportunity for too many questions that any fairly reasonable time traveler from 2025 would have asked the minute they landed in another year and century, especially of their own city. This book’s good intentions aren’t enough to save it.