54 pages • 1 hour read
Ashley PostonThe Seven Year Slip
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Contemporary Romance
Many of Ashley Poston’s novels, including The Seven Year Slip, fall into the genre of contemporary romance and the subgenre of romantic comedy. Although The Seven Year Slip deals with dark subjects such as suicide, grief, and loss, it is underpinned by lighthearted and comedic moments that often shift the tone away from more serious subject matter. Contemporary romances are categorized by their happy endings and familiar plotlines but often focus on the main characters’ personal growth and the obstacles they must overcome to achieve their happy ending. As in The Seven Year Slip, most contemporary romance heroines and heroes are flawed; these narratives often show them helping each other overcome barriers not only to becoming romantically involved but also to being better and happier people.
The romance genre has experienced a recent boom as a result of the social media platform TikTok. BookTok, a subcommunity of TikTok, brought romance novels to the forefront for many readers, rising in popularity particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. BookTok has largely affected sales and the positive reception of popularized books on the platform, where creators review and discuss books they’ve read. While not entirely dedicated to the romance genre, BookTok often trends towards content about romance novels. Common discussions in BookTok videos include reader reception and tropes.
Romance tropes, archetypes, and situations, such as enemies-to-lovers relationships, marriage-of-convenience plotlines, and small-town settings, often attract readers searching for the comfort of familiar plotlines. The Seven Year Slip uses many conventions typical of contemporary romance novels, including the opposites-attract trope, in which two characters who would not normally cross paths are brought together by chance and fall in love. Forced proximity, or the “only-one-bed” trope, is another common plot device used in The Seven Year Slip, as it forces characters like Clementine and Iwan to be physically close despite their attempts to avoid becoming romantically involved. Poston also makes use of the conventions of paranormal or fantasy romance in the ways the magical apartment affects Clementine and Iwan’s relationship. With the time slip, the novel’s heroes are kept apart by more than just their personal feelings, but a barrier symbolic of what they must learn before they can be with one another.
Authorial Context: Ashley Poston
Ashley Poston is a best-selling author known primarily for her contemporary romance novels. She published her first novel in 2013 after a decade of working in the publishing industry. Poston has received various praise and accolades, particularly for her adult romance debut, The Dead Romantics, and The Seven Year Slip, both of which blend serious themes with comedy and magic. Poston’s work often blends romance with fantasy or magical realism, incorporating elements of the different genres to emphasize major themes such as grief, loss, and growth. In her “Author’s Note” for The Seven Year Slip, Poston claims that “Every book is a time capsule” and that novels capture “a singular point in time when an author writes a book that maybe, someday, a future you will visit and read” (284).
The Seven Year Slip is informed by Poston’s experience working in the publishing industry in New York City. While writing the novel, Poston worked on three major drafts as she promoted her previous book about death and grief. As she was writing The Seven Year Slip, Poston’s grandfather died by suicide, and she has discussed the complexities and intricacies of grief both within the text and in her supplementary material, saying “Grief is a weird thing. It can be a monster on your shoulder. It can be a friend sitting with you at the table [...] And grief—what it looks like, how it whispers, how you respond—is different for everyone” (284). Echoing the themes of change and stagnancy in her novel, Poston says of The Seven Year Slip, “No matter how much I change, or will change, or will learn, this book will be stagnant. It’ll exist here, forever unchanged, along with the pieces of me that I put into the pages” (285).
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