A poignant and enchanting novel about a magical bookstore that transports a trans man through time and brings him face-to-face with his teenage self, offering him the chance of a lifetime to examine his life and identity to find a new beginning.
When Darby finds himself unemployed and in need of a fresh start, he moves back to the small Illinois town he left behind. But Oak Falls has changed almost as much as he has since he left.
One thing is familiar: In Between Books, Darby’s refuge growing up and eventual high school job. When he walks into the bookstore now, Darby feels an eerie sense of déjà vu—everything is exactly the same. Even the newspapers are dated 2009. And behind the register is a teen who looks a lot like Darby did at sixteen. . . who just might give Darby the opportunity to change his own present for the better—if he can figure out how before his connection to the past vanishes forever.
The In-Between Bookstore is a stunning novel of love, self-discovery, and the choices that come with both, for anyone who has ever wondered what their life might be like if they had the chance to go back and take a bigger, braver risk.

My Review:

There are two sayings about home, and they usually contradict each other. There’s the one about home being the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in, and the one that says you can’t go home again.

Darby never thought he’d want to go back to his tiny Illinois hometown, but he’s about to turn 30, the start-up he’s been working for has just folded, and the rent on his New York City shoebox apartment is going up at the end of the month to a point he couldn’t even have afforded when he was working. He has zero idea what to do with himself about any of it.

He needs a break. Or a breather. Or a reset. All of the above. So, even if Oak Falls is the last place he ever thought he’d want to go, it’s where his mom is – and she’s just about to move out of his childhood home into a brand spanking new condo.

Darby can help her move. He can take a breath and figure out what comes next for him. He can even, maybe, figure out why his first and best friendship imploded just before he left town all those years ago. He kind of needs to, because he may have blown up his friendships in NYC on his way out of town this time around in exactly the same way.

History repeats, or Darby’s patterns do – even when they kind of don’t. Because Oak Falls Darby was pre-transition, and NYC Darby is post that milestone. Although neither Darby is quite as sure of their place in the world as either Darby had ever hoped to be. At least NYC Darby is sure of who he is – even if he’s not sure where to go from here.

So he goes home. To find that Oak Falls isn’t nearly as unwelcoming as he thought it would be – either in his present – or for that matter, in the past, in that last summer before everything changed.

The changes in Oak Falls are everywhere – except for one place. When Darby steps through the doors of In-Between Books on Main Street, while the outside world may be in the early 2020s, the world inside the store is frozen in 2009, complete with 2009 Darby sitting behind the register, drowning in teenage angst and alienation, uncertain about what box they’ll get shoehorned into if they never leave Oak Falls, afraid that they can’t be who they were meant to be in a place that seems to have no room for anyone who might be any kind of queer.

In that liminal space, where the Darby that is can maybe, hopefully, possibly, pass on a bit of information if not wisdom to the Darby that was, there might be a chance to make things better in the present by changing the past.

Unless Darby accidentally follows in the footsteps of Marty McFly in Back to the Future and wipes himself out of existence altogether.

Escape Rating B: From one perspective Darby’s story is a peek at what would happen if one really did have a chance to go back in time and tell one’s younger self the things they know now that they didn’t know them. Even if that message is just “it’ll get better”. But Darby has things they need to know, and things they want to fix. They have a bit of a mystery to solve in the past, in the hopes that it will make things better in the present. If they can work up the courage to talk to, well, themselves.

At the same time, there’s another mystery they need to solve in the present – or perhaps it’s a function of taking off the blinders of teenage self-centeredness and angst. Darby wasn’t exactly wrong in that they didn’t fit in Oak Falls as a teen. Then again, Darby didn’t fit inside his own skin as a teen – and he reflected that outward and inflicted it on everyone more than he remembered that he had.

In other words, Darby is surprised AF that there’s a queer community in Oak Falls, and he wonders how he missed that it even existed when he was in high school. He’s astonished that so many of the kids he knew then, who he thought were all as straight as could be, mostly weren’t. Including his best friend.

The story develops slowly over the course of the book, and a lot of that slow pacing is dealing with Darby’s angst and impostor syndrome in both the past and the present. He was so busy looking inward in the past that he didn’t see the people around him, and in the present he’s just as busy looking at how much it feels like he’s failing at adulting on every level that he’s missing the damage he’s unintentionally doing to the people around him.

But even as Darby is working through his internal struggles, there’s also the two outward ones. The big one, the magically fantastic one, the one about the bookstore that’s letting him talk to his past, and whether he can use that window through time to give himself a better future by figuring out the break in his past. Then there’s the mystery in the present, the issue of who Darby wants to be now that he’s supposedly grown up and whether he wants to be that person in Oak Falls or New York City.

So I loved the parts about the store, enjoyed the parts about returning home and getting a sample of the life he might have had if he’d stayed, but could have done with a bit less reflection on general teenage angst. Your reading mileage on that part may vary.

In the end, what really worked for me in this story is that it doesn’t end in a romance. Not that the potential isn’t there – because it is. But because in order for the romance to work, someone would have had to twist themselves into being someone – or at least somewhere – that they weren’t meant to be based on the choices they’d already made.

Darby’s magical bookstore visits gave him the chance to see what his life might have been if he’d gone down the other leg of the trousers of time. But that life is on another branch of the multiverse and he recognizes that and the story is all the better for it.

Which left me with one last saying stuck in my head, “For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been!” Making this story some of the fluffiest sad fluff that ever fluffed. Because it is sad. The life that Darby catches glimpses of would have been a good one – if he really had known then what he knows now. But he didn’t and it isn’t and the story is better for not having tried to wring out a happy ending that in the life Darby actually had, in this branch of the multiverse, was not meant to be.