All Our Wrong Todays

Tom has just 20 seconds to save the world. But which world will he choose?

You know the future that people in the fifties imagined we'd have? Flying cars, food pills and moon bases? Well, it happened. And it's just as great as we hoped it would be. Except, in this world, a series of heartbreaks leaves Tom alone. So he hijacks his father's time machine, and goes back to where it all began - the moment when the world as we know it, and the world as Tom lives it, parted ways, due to a ground-breaking experiment.

Only, thanks to Tom's accidental intrusion, the experiment fails and he returns 'home' to find his world erased and replaced with our own 2016 - by comparison, a chaotic mess. In our world, however, Tom discovers vastly improved versions of his family, his career, and - best of all - his soulmate, Penny. So. Should he fix the flow of history, bringing back into existence his old utopian reality, or to try to forge a new life in our messy one?

About the Author

Elan Mastai was born in Vancouver and lives in Toronto with his wife and children. He writes movies. All Our Wrong Todays is his first novel.

Review by Bronwyn Eley

From the get-go, I affectionately referred to this book as ‘The Lemon Book’ (so named due to that gorgeous cover), so that is what I will call it in this review. In a nutshell, The Lemon Book did not disappoint. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect with this book - I mean, flying cars, food pills and moon bases sound great, but surely the future’s not as amazing as The Jetsons made it out to be?

Yeah...it’s not.

Tom’s life is anything but amazing. His mum is dead (thanks to a flying car), his dad is cold and unloving, and the woman he loves? Well… let’s just say I feel bad for Tom.

There’s this concept in the book about how for every great new invention, the accident of that thing is also invented. The invention of the car came with car accidents, the invention of the plane came with plane crashes, and so on and so forth. This turns out to be a big theme in this book - they invented time travel, so what is the accident? As it turns out, it’s Tom. And he proves to be a very big accident indeed.

Tom spends most of the novel trying to make up for his disastrous mistake, although his actions leading up to it are kind of reasonable, given the circumstances. That’s what I like most about this book - for all of Tom’s flaws I found that in some strange way I understood him, and I appreciated how honest he was. In an endearing way, this whole book reads like the first draft of a very messy memoir, or like diary entries exposing the whiny, arrogant man beneath. When I look back on diary entries I’ve written over the years, I cringe to think of anyone else reading them, and it was this unflinching honesty that lured me in. I felt like I really knew every part of Tom - especially the ugly parts we usually keep hidden.

All in all, this book isn’t just about flying cars and food pills. It isn’t all cuddles and kisses either. Tom’s journey into adulthood and maturity may make it look like the universe is playing a cruel, twisted game on him, but it makes for one hell of a book.

On that cheerful note, I have one last thing I’d like to say: *chants* Movie, movie, movie, movie!