Sadly, this was a miss for me.

I absolutely loved The Dead Romantics (5 stars and in my top reads of 2022). The Seven Year Slip felt like a bland and cheap knockoff of the previous novel. I didn’t feel like the story was complete once I finished. The romance was half-baked (hello, instalove!), the rules of the magical apartment were confusing, and some of the connections were left unconnected.

I am just very disappointed. Part of that may be because my expectations were so high. I just felt like this was a watered down version of The Dead Romantics.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and Ashley Poston for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you so much for an advanced copy of this book! I really enjoyed it.

First off, do not expect this book to be a pure romance. Similar to The Dead Romantics, The Seven Year Slip is really more of a women's fiction book that centers around the main character Clementine. The story focuses on her romantic relationship, yes, but there is also a heavy focus on her relationship with her aunt, her changing life plans, her career, etc. There's a lot going on for Clementine! She's a likable character, and I enjoyed her journey so much!

Second, I was hanging on for all the adorable moments between Clementine and Ewan. I thought the apartment magical realism concept was adorable, and I knew I was alternately signing up for both heartache and romance as I continued to read. My biggest complaint is I wanted more romance!

Thank you so much to Berkley Romance for an advanced copy of The Seven Year Slip.

Rating: 4⭐️

“That was love, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just a quick drop — it was falling, over and over again, for your person.”

😭😭😭

I absolutely loved The Dead Romantics and somehow, this book topped it. If you want Emily Henry with a fun paranormal aspect, you need to be reading Ashley Poston.

I loved this story so much, it was about more than just falling in love at the wrong time, it was about discovering who you are and how to deal with grief.

Please read this.

🐦THE•SEVEN•YEAR•SLIP🐦
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The Dead Romantics was a big hit for me last year, so reading Ashley Poston’s newest book was a treat!
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Clementine inherits her Aunt’s apartment, an apartment she’s heard about all her life. The apartment is magical. It has a tendency to send you 7 years into the future with no rhyme or reason. Just as Clementine is trying to deal with grief and loneliness, the apartment sends her Iwan.

Read this book of you like:
🐦time travel
🐦magical realism
🐦yummy food references
🐦swoony romance
🐦strong female friendships
🐦all the feels
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I loved this book. I think it will be a popular read this summer!
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Thank you netgalley and Berkeley Publishing for the opportunity to read this book!

Thank you, NetGalley and Berkley, for this digital ARC in exchange for my honest review!

I don't know why I was so hesitant to start this book because it was PHENOMENAL! I guess I was nervous because I enjoyed The Dead Romantics so much and I didn't know whether Poston could make this book's premise work, too, but she DID! Poston is 2/2 for unique, paranormal adult romances!

Synopsis: After inheriting her aunt's apartment -- which she was always told was "magical" -- Clementine comes to realize she is not the place's only inhabitant. Iwan, an aspiring chef, is staying in the apartment for the summer, and he charms Clementine from the get-go. The catch? Iwan -- and the apartment -- are seven years in the past. Clementine must come to grips with this fact while also navigating work, friends, family, and new love while also trying to find Iwan in the present day. (If I'm not explaining this well, it's because the plot is a bit hard to wrap your head around, but trust me: it works!)

Of course, the best part of The Seven Year Slip is the romance! Iwan is charming and charismatic and swoonworthy. Any scene he was in was automatically 100x better. I loved his interactions with Clementine. They had great discussions about food and art and life. The spice was minimal but still good; the lead-up to it was excellent. If you're looking for a sexy, caring love interest, this book has it!

The premise, as I mentioned, fell short a few times, especially since Clementine only met young Iwan like, four times? However, I liked how the seven-year difference presented a nice juxtaposition between young Iwan and the older Iwan. Poston stressed how people change and that is okay, and I thought that was a beautiful theme <3

Another thing that fell short was Clementine's friendships. Her relationships with Drew and Fiona felt a bit forced, like they were just there to be there. I think they added a lot of support and humor to the story, though, so they were a bit important to the plot.

Content warning: this book discusses the death of a loved one (as caused by suicide) extensively. Please use care when reading this book. I thought Poston handled these topics beautifully, though.

Clementine was a good main character. She was dealing with grief and questioning her work passion through most of the book, so she was often in her head, which could be hard to get through. I thought her friends and Iwan brought out the best of her, however, so that was fun to read.

Overall, this was just a really good book, and I want to reread it immediately! Also, you should be excited for the cameos of characters from The Dead Romantics ;)

Set in publishing world, there is a bit about marketing the books, author which was fascinating. I am not a fantasy genre reader…yet but I like the fantasy element is Ms.
Poston books. They are….magical. The characters, plot and writing are sooo good! Romance element is center to it but it felt also about grief, life choices, relationship and their complications. I loved the story of her aunt as much as their story.

Author Ashley Poston has written an impressive story that intricately weaves magical realism, drama, rollicking comedy, and of course heartfelt romance. The depictions of grief, death, suicide and pregnancy are all portrayed in a relatable way, that will keep the reader thinking about the ending for a long time to come.

For anyone looking for a well-rounded story with tug-at-your-heartstrings contemporary romance, you will LOVE The Seven Year Slip. Five of five strong stars to Poston for a gorgeously written love story, making her one of my favorite authors to date! Proud to have recommended this to LibraryReads for tackling strong themes and mixing these themes with relativity in a way that will resonate with all readers!!

DROP EVERYTHING AND ADD TO CART. I absolutely loved this one! This was super cute and a quick read. At first, I had to learn about the different “time-travel” zones, but once I understood it, it was amazing! I can’t wait to read more of her books. Thank you for the ARC! :)

💛THE SEVEN YEAR SLIP by Ashley Poston💛

📆Pub date: June 20th, 2023
➡️Swipe for synopsis
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Format: E-book
Read if you like:
💛Adorable love stories
🪄Magical Realism
📖Books set in book publishing

Say hello to my favorite book of the year so far🙌 It’s honestly hard to find words how cute, funny, and emotional this book is. I adored everything about it, from the setting in the book publishing world to the magical apartment that sometimes sends you 7 years in the past. Obviously you need to suspend disbelief for this, as with any magical realism book. The Seven Year Slip combines Emily Henry’s signature wit with a beautiful magical element that makes my perfect book.

Clementine’s aunt leaves her her NYC apartment upon her death, an apartment that has a tendency to send you 7 years in the past. When Clementine moves in and meets a man who was subletting from his aunt 7 years ago, she falls in love. Will she be able to find him in the present time? You’ll have to read to find out😉. While this book is light and cute, there are very emotional aspects that had me tearing up. There is a good amount of talk about suicide, so please keep that in mind if that’s something you’re not comfortable reading about.

Endless thanks to berkley romance for the advanced copy of The Seven Year Slip!

"The Seven Year Slip" by Ashley Poston is a Blend of Contemporary Romance and Magical Realism!

"This apartment is magical"...

This is what twenty-nine-year-old Clementine was told by her Aunt Analea when she was eight years old.

Of course Clementine believes the apartment is magical, it's in a one-hundred-year-old building on the Upper East Side of New York City. It has windows that let in bright reflective light, a study that's overflowing with books, and a claw foot tub in the bathroom where she loves to paint with her watercolors. She has seen rainbows on the walls of that bathroom for heaven's sake.

Clementine believes it's her Aunt who makes all things magical...

Then Aunt Analea leans closer to her niece, smiles, and tells her Darling Clementine a secret...

"The Seven Year Slip" IS magical! With short chapters I love and a Time Slip story that offers two irresistible main characters, Clementine and Iwan, who are both vulnerable and determined to live their lives according to their individual plans. Their dreams about their future matter to them.

To be honest, I wasn't sure I wanted to read "The Seven Year Slip" as many Contemporary Romance novels aren't for me. This is a story that's fun and romantic, happy and sad, and the characters are written with care and intention. Best of all, the bedroom door is only slightly ajar and tastefully handled. I'm glad I read this book and just so you know: You.Will.Ugly.Cry!

I believe I've read enough books to know when authors love their characters, their stories, and how they're written. It's obvious great care went into this story and the author shares this with the reader so be sure to read her notes within the Readers Guide at the end. As a reader, I appreciate this kind of openness, vulnerability, and authenticity from an author.

I plan to double back and listen to her Adult debut novel "The Dead Romantics" soon. I love "The Seven Year Slip" and highly recommend it to readers who enjoy Contemporary Romance so artfully blended with Magical Realism!

4.25⭐ Magical Stars!

Thank you to Berkley for an ARC of this book through NetGalley. It has been an honor to give my honest and voluntary review.

I devoured this book. Which is funny since one of the characters is a chef. I love this author. I will read anything she puts into book form. This is not my normal genre but I don't even care. A grieving woman inherits an apartment in Manhattan that takes you back in time to the thing it thinks you need. She slips back seven years and meets someone staying in her aunt's apartment. And there's romance and drama. I loved it.

The nitty-gritty: A feel-good romance with substance and just a touch of the speculative, The Seven Year Slip was a delight from start to finish.

Color me surprised. This horror, sci-fi lovin’ girl just fell for a contemporary romance, and I’m totally OK with that! I’ve enjoyed Ashley Poston’s YA series Once Upon a Con, so when I heard about The Seven Year Slip, I decided to request it. Sometimes a book hits you just right and all the elements work perfectly, and this is one of those happy instances. Romance fans are going to want to grab this, and even if you aren’t a fan of the genre, Poston’s story has a lot more than just romance to offer readers.

The story takes place in New York City and revolves around a senior publicist named Clementine. Clementine’s beloved Aunt Analea died six months ago, and she’s still mourning her loss. She’s inherited her aunt’s old apartment on the Upper East Side and is still trying to make it her own. Memories of her aunt are everywhere, including two important rules she instilled in her niece years ago: always take your shoes off by the door, and never fall in love. Clementine is too busy with her job at Strauss & Adder to worry about that second rule anyway. She’s next in line for a big promotion, and she pours her heart and soul into the authors and books she works with.

But one day she comes home after work, only to discover a strange man in the apartment. He claims his mother knows Aunt Analea, who offered to sublet him the apartment for the summer. Wait, what? The man—a young, aspiring chef named Iwan—acts as if Aunt Analea is still alive. As it turns out, she is, since Clementine has just stepped back in time. Her aunt told Clementine that the apartment was magical, but back then she didn’t understand. Now it hits her: the apartment appears to be a time portal of sorts that randomly takes you back seven years into the past. 

As Clementine and Iwan get to know each other, she begins to realize Iwan is exactly the type of man she could fall for. And when an up-and-coming chef approaches Strauss & Adder with a book proposal, she knows she’s in trouble. The chef, James Ashton, just happens to be Iwan—seven years older than when she met him in the apartment. And now her company is bidding on his memoir/cook book, and Clementine doesn’t know what to do. James (middle name Iwan!) is colder and more business-like than the Iwan she fell for, and she’s having trouble reconciling the two different men.

As the bidding process for his book heats up, Clementine and James realize they still have a lot of chemistry. If only the past weren’t trying to come between them.

This story is actually very hard to sum up, and a lot more happens than what I’ve described above. The time travel/time slip storyline is pretty cool, and there’s just enough of it to make things interesting without turning it into hard-core speculative fiction. I loved the idea of an apartment that can take the person who lives there back in time seven years. But it’s a random event, so Clementine never knows when she opens the front door whether Iwan will be there or not. It’s a fun concept that keeps the romance fresh and unpredictable.

Aside from that element, there is so much about this story that I loved. Clementine is surrounded by wonderful friends, each one with a fully developed personality. Drew is the rock star editor at Strauss & Adder, and Fiona works in the design department. The three friends are extremely close and do everything together. It reminded me a bit of the friendship between Carrie and her friends in Sex in the City. We get to know Aunt Analea through flashbacks and see glimpses of her and Clementine and their summer trips together. There's also a love story between Analea and a woman named Vera, and even though it didn't end well, Clementine wants nothing more than to experience the kind of love Analea and Vera had. 

Then of course, there is Iwan/James, the man who upends Clementine's carefully controlled world. When Clementine meets him for the first time, he’s about to interview for a dishwasher position at a trendy restaurant, hoping to get his foot in the door and then move up the ranks. I loved his earnest personality and the way he calls Clementine “Lemon.” The dialog between the two is both sweet and hysterically funny. Ashley Poston is simply a genius when it comes to dialog! Of course there are lots of stumbling blocks along the way with their relationship, and Poston comes up with some great scenarios surrounding the seven year time jumps.

There’s also a lot of heart in this story. James introduces Clementine to the best fajitas in New York, courtesy of two culinary school friends who own a successful food truck. The relationship between Clementine and Analea was wonderful, and I loved the way Analea loved to travel the world with her niece. The publishing company, Strauss & Adder, specializes in travel guides, and I thought that was a nice touch, as it creates a connection to Clementine’s past exploits with her aunt. Poston adds some thoughtful moments to the story by exploring the idea of creating a life that you love, and learning how to recognize when you’ve strayed off that path. Both Clementine and Iwan do a lot of soul searching about their jobs during the story, and this more serious element was a nice contrast to the lighter moments.

If you’re a fan of movies like When Harry Met Sally or You’ve Got Mail—both set in New York, by the way—I think you’ll absolutely love The Seven Year Slip. I swear, if someone doesn’t make this into a movie, I’ll be very surprised, it practically screams “film adaptation”! I’m so glad I picked up this book, and now I need to go back and read Poston’s The Dead Romantics, which I hear is great. Highly recommended!

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.

Thank you to NetGalley and Berkley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I loved The Dead Romantics, but I think I loved this book more! The chemistry between Clementine and Iwan was perfectly written, their love story unfolding in two timelines. I loved the plot, I loved the romance, and I loved the little crossover with Benji and Florence.

If you loved this authors debut, you’ll adore her newest book. They both have the same spooky/sci-fi factor, while still being an ooey gooey romance that has you giggling and kicking your feet in the air! I highly recommend this book.

Another magical story from Poston! The Seven Year Slip follows Clementine through a transitional part of her life. Her beloved aunt has died and left her her apartment. Clementine was always told this apartment was “magical” and now she gets to experience it herself. She meets chef-in-training Iwan who she loves as a young aspiring chef. But will she meet him in the present? Will she love that version? This story is a slow burn and swoon worthy while covering deeper topics of grief, regret and following one’s dreams. Highly recommend for all readers

Quick Stats
Age Rating: 18+
Spice Level: 1/5
Over All: 4.5 stars

Special thanks to Berkley Romance and NetGalley for an eARC of this book! All thoughts and opinions reflected in this review are my own.

TW: loss of family member, suicide, grief, sexual content

Ashley Poston is simply phenomenal—and I adore her in this adult romance space. There’s something about her writing—the narration, the emotion—that feels slightly reminiscent of Emily Henry, to me. I find it kind of funny, that EH went from writing YA paranormal romance to adult contemporary, while AP went from writing YA contemporary romance to adult paranormal romance.
Though I think if I had to describe this book and The Dead Romantics, I’d say theyre kind of a soft paranormal romance. Because they’re magical—ghosts, apartments lost in time—but they’re much closer to what you’d think of as contemporary romances than what you’d think of in paranormal romances, or at least how I think of those genres.
All of that is to say, I love what Ashley Poston is doing with her latest books, and I want more of it.
As for this book specifically—I really enjoyed it! I didn’t find it quite to the level of The Dead Romantics, but it was a solid book. Fun and swoony and heartfelt. There were a few instances where I felt like the writing was trying a little too hard to be deep and emotional and introspective, but those instances were greatly outnumbered by moments where those emotions felt genuine and sweeping.
I loved Clementine. Her voice was distinct and easy to get swept up in. I loved watching her grow as a character, and I was sad to part with her at the end.
Iwan, too, was easy to love and easy to fall for. I loved seeing the differences between him in the past vs the present, while Clementine stayed the same. It’s a very interesting juxtaposition to explore, and one that doesn’t often get explored.
The two of them together was just perfection. The chemistry was tangible and their little banter had me kicking my feet. I love nicknames in theory, but in reality they tend to be very hit or miss for me, but this one was definitely a hit! It was a little overused (he referred to her by name [or by nickname, I suppose] at least 5 times as often as she did, sometimes multiple times in a page) but there were so many layers behind him calling her that, that I couldn’t help but love it.
This is, like The Dead Romantics, more of an emotional romance than a romcom, despite the voicy narration and some comedic scenes and aspects. There is a very centralized theme of grief and loss that could easily be triggering to some, especially if you go in unprepared. I really enjoyed the way it was addressed, though. Despite the fact that it was more distanced in timing than the loss explored in TDR, it felt heavier at times in its exploration. I didn’t cry as much as I did reading TDR, yet I felt more depressed while reading the scenes as they occurred—not in a bad way, at all, just in a way that was notable. There is so much love in this book, in many forms, and one of those forms is explored through grief.
All in all, this was a really good book, and I look forward to whatever Ashley Poston releases next, whether its another adult romance or back to the YA sphere.

I really enjoyed The Dead Romantics; so I was very excited to read this one! I loved the "magical realism" side of this book so much. The time "slipping" apartment was genius. Sadly, I didn't connect with the characters the way I hoped to. I liked the "7 years ago" narrative but the present day fell flat for me. I didn't feel chemistry between them. Additionally, it was hard to keep track of when in the timeline they were because there weren't clear transitions between the time shifts.

This book took my breath away. This book made me feel sad, and happy, and loved, and reminded me of how beautiful all of those feelings are.

Iwan and Clementine will make you fall in love. They will remind you of how special love is. Not only romantic love but love between friends and between family.

This book also talks about suicide and someone committing suicide so please be gentle with yourself as you read it.

As someone who lost someone dear to her to suicide this book gave me a sense of healing I didn’t even know I needed.

The way magical realism blends into contemporary is done seamlessly.

I hope you love this book as much as I did because it might be my favorite this year!

oh my gosh I loved everything about this book! The concept of an apartment that transports to the past was so unique and genius. this book gives series The Lake House vibes and I loved it. The banter and chemistry in this book was on another level. This story was magical and heartwarming all at the same time.

Ashley Poston always comes up with interesting premises for her novels; and THE SEVEN YEAR SLIP was no exception. I really liked a lot about this one — the magical apartment, the New York setting, the inclusion of food and book publishing and art. It felt really cozy to read, which was just what I needed at the time I picked this one up.

That being said, the one aspect that didn’t quite stick the landing completely for me was the romance. I could believe the attraction and connection between the characters, sure, but the depth of the devotion didn’t necessarily feel 100% believable all the time. Still, I got emotional at the end and I also appreciated how Poston wrapped things up for Clementine (and not just when it comes to the romance).

I have fallen in love with Ashley Poston's writing style and was so happy to get an early galley of this book! I really enjoyed the premise of this one. Clementine is an overworked publicist who has been a bit lost since the death of her aunt. Clementine's aunt has always told her to chase the moon but Clementine has been finding that hard to do lately and just feels stuck, that is until she finds a strange man in her aunt's apartment. He's attractive, has a southern drawl and is just the kind of man that could steal her heart. The trouble is, he exists 7 years in the past. Clementine's aunt always told her the apartment was magic and now she is experiencing that magic first hand. The stronger the connection between Clementine and Iwan grows the more certain Clementine is that the relationship is doomed especially since she has no control over when the apartment will bring her to him. Things get even more complicated when Clementine crosses paths with Iwan, now going by James in her present.