This Time Tomorrow

"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

"The struggling Mexican-American families depicted in Jaime-Becerra's debut will strike a chord with readers, but the intermittently moving narrative too often gets stuck in the spin cycle. Since his wife left him, Gilbert Gaeta has been supporting his 13-year-old daughter, Ana, with night shifts at a local dairy. Though he can barely pay his mortgage, he dreams of saving up to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend, Joyce, so she'll move out of her father's house and in with him. But when Ana starts to complain about being bullied at the Laundromat, Gaeta must choose between his dreams and buying Ana the washer and dryer she wants. Meanwhile, Joyce looks after her controlling father and secretly plans to sell her beloved purse collection so she and Gaeta can start their life together on solid ground. Despite its 1988 setting, Gaeta and Joyce's struggles feel current, and their working-class lives solidly lived."—Publishers Weekly

"Like his acclaimed short-story collection Every Night Is Ladies' Night (2004), Jaime-Becerra's debut novel is set in El Monte, a working-class Mexican American community in Southern California. Gilbert Gaeta, a single dad, works the night shift at the local dairy; his daughter, Ana, is 13 and struggling with the realization that her dad might marry again. Gaeta almost has enough saved for an engagement ring for Joyce, a cashier at the cable office who, at age 36, still lives with her domineering father. But, tired of dragging herself to the laundromat every Saturday, Ana hatches a plan to convince him to buy a washer-dryer combo instead, a plan with repercussions that reverberate throughout the novel. Jaime-Becerra brilliantly injects himself into each of these three characters, gradually revealing Gaeta's insecurities about raising his daughter alone, Ana's fears that he will love Joyce more than he does her, and Joyce's apprehension about letting this chance at marriage pass her by. Packed with details of his characters' barely scraping-by existence, Jaime-Becerra's heartfelt debut brings an entire community vividly to life."—Deborah Donovan, Booklist