“’This Time Tomorrow’ [is] the naturalistic, deeply empathetic tale of a forklift driver, Gilbert Gaeta, and his quest to fulfill his modest vision of the American immigrant dream, with his girlfriend, Joyce, and willful 13-year-old daughter Ana in tow. Threading his lyrical prose…with the hyper-realistic particulars of daily life, Jaime-Becerra elevates his struggling East L.A. Everyman to heroic heights. If John Cheever or William Trevor had spent their early careers living and typing away in a bungalow in the San Gabriel Valley, absorbing its sensations and getting to know its residents, this might be the result.”—The Los Angeles Times
"'This Time Tomorrow' draws its central characters with great sympathy."--The New York Times Book Review
“Michael Jaime-Becerra writes about a southern California that not enough people know, and This Time Tomorrow opens a window and lets readers step through into this place he loves and details so carefully and lyrically. This is a place of hidden beauty and laughter and pain, and people who sing and lament, lovers who narrow their eyes and forge ahead, music that everyone should hear now.”—Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales
“Scrupulously detailed and tough-minded, This Time Tomorrow is an anti-romance about the lack of money and its effect on regular working people. The world of Michael Jaime-Becerra's debut is one in which the possibility of overtime offers hope, and filling out a deposit slip is a victory.”—Stewart O’Nan, author of Songs for the Missing
"What? No streety cholos from the 'hood, no desperate, sad illegals broken by the other side, no charming, magical poverty? Michael Jaime-Becerra instead has ordinary Angelenos living ordinary American lives. Is that crazy or what? Jaime-Becerra is carrying on a tradition of literature that cuts deep into the American psyche, one that only happens to be Mexican-American."--Dagoberto Gilb, PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of The Flowers
