★★☆☆☆ It's Groundhog Day

Until Persephone Comes Home

Seanan McGuire

** spoiler alert **

This story is the December 2021 reward from Seanan McGuire's Patreon.

The central technical conceit of this story is identical in almost every detail to that of the movie Groundhog Day. Our hero, Seph (short for Persephone, one presumes) is trapped in a one-day time loop in a small city. Events repeat day after day, and Seph has a routine in which, for instance, she saves a young mother in the park from spilling hot coffee on her child every morning, and so on. As in the movie, fatal events are only temporarily fatal -- if Seph manages to off herself, she wakes up the next morning unchanged.

The big difference from Groundhog Day is that Seph entered this time loop voluntarily as part of her job. She is trying to find a way to prevent a disaster that occurs at the end of the day (every day, for Seph). She's been at this for ten years subjective time.

There are two things about the story that make me less than wildly enthusiastic. The first I have already described -- the central idea is not new. The second and much bigger problem to me is that there isn't much of a story here. There's only one character to speak of, and, although there is a plot, it's etiolated and weak. I didn't really care much about the resolution.

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