Funeral director Adam Rhodes is equally frustrated. Every loop, Adam regenerates in the middle of a fight with his ex-wife. Her infidelity wrecked their perfect life together, and now Adam must relive her confession over and over again.
There’s only one solution to ending the misery: breaking the time loop. Easier said than done. And there’s another hurdle to overcome: Carly and Adam can’t stand each other.
Though strangers at best, Carly and Adam know they must work together to solve this cosmic mystery. But where Carly offers magical theories, Adam relies on facts and figures. When Carly wants to involve the local conspiracy theorist, Adam would rather work alone. The sooner they find a solution, the sooner they’ll never have to see each other again, yet somehow the tension between the two is hotter than a solar flare and as rare as the daily total solar eclipse. Maybe Carly and Adam are destined to be in each other’s orbit after all… (Pub Date: Nov 11 2025)
3+ stars.
This brings a different twist to the Groundhog Day trope: what if the whole town is stuck in a time loop? They don't even get to live the full day, it always resets at the same time and back to the middle of the morning. And for Carly it's even worse because she's not from that town, and she's in front of the casket where her dear father lies in a funeral of just one person.
Another different twist is that we barely see the beginning stage of the loop. The story skips to over a hundred days ahead, when the town is already "used" to their condition, cut out from the world, unable to leave or even die. It's when Adam, the director of the funeral home where Carly resets every morning, notices the eclipse that occurs every loop is getting short. But why? The only thing that changed ever since they got stuck was his new-found proximity to Carly, but it couldn't be related, right?
For a while there was an attempt at enemies to lovers, the origin of which I never got, but it was luckily a soon abandoned idea as the two start investigating if the eclipse could be related to the time loop prison they're in. And I'd say that as good an idea for them to become closer as it can be, all the attempt to make this story more scientific was its very weak spot. It was too shallow to be interesting (it was cool to hear of the solar bands, a real event during solar eclipses, but what about them in the end?), so their investigation was just a bit boring. And also, why hadn't they attempted any of that before? A hundred days is a lot of days to just be idling around a small town.
Also the climax could have been better. It had a good idea, but the execution seemed hushed and confusing. Worse, we suddenly overcome everything? Huh? The final section was all over the place for me.
Of course you'll treat this as a lighthearted romcom, but because it had elements to be more, because it seemed to want to be more, I was a little disappointed. Still, it's got great points: the main couple works, their romance is good, the character development is also very good. I also kept thinking about grief, about life choices, about how it's never too late to change course in life. Since it's a book with various themes that could be heavy but got presented in a lighthearted manner, I felt safe enough to do some serious thinking about my own life. It's a good book, just not where you'd think it would be.
Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.
Rating: 3 out of 5.
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