Once Upon a Tomorrow by Karen Comer

Title: Once Upon a Tomorrow

Author: Karen Comer

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Published: 28^th April 2026

Format: Paperback

Pages:

Price: $19.99

Synopsis: Three girls. Three fates. Three interwoven stories. Spanning a hundred years from the present to the future, three girls on the cusp of life search for truth and connection amid family dysfunction, climate change and the march of new technology in this exquisite verse novel from the award-winning author of Grace Notes.

Miri, an eighteen-year-old hopeful Jungian student, discovers she’s pregnant in 2025.

Aleita, sixteen, shelters in the library, the one place free of jolts to her digital implant in 2125.

Interwoven between them stands Sylvie, spinning tapestries to save her life and the kingdom. Sylvie exists in the pages of a mysterious fairytale titled The Girl at the Threshold.

Miri, Aleita and Sylvie each need to make a choice in their search for the truth. All three are connected through time by heartbreak, a desperate need to save the environment and a search for family and community.

An expansive verse novel about the parallel journeys of three extraordinary girls carving out their own histories – and each other’s.

~*~

Meet Miri, Aleita and Sylvie. Three girls connected by one hundred years of words of fairytales and patriarchy. Worlds where women are supposed to have choice, but where the men in their lives try to tell them what to do.

In 2025, Miri is finishing year twelve, determined to study Jung and psychology, and she’s pregnant. Everyone wants to decide for her, because they don’t want to let her make her own choices. Especially her father and stepmother, who have distinct ideas about Miri’s life.

Then in 2125, Aleita live in a world where everyone has implants that jolt them about everything in their lives, and that are seemingly hijacking people and forcing accidents and patriarchal ideas onto everyone in a bid to control things. The only place Aleita can’t be jolted is the library, which is the focus of the entire book.

The somewhere in between is Sylvie, caught in a fairy tale world where she spins tapestries to save her life and the kingdom, another place where men and the patriarchy are trying to control things, to ensure everyone is complacent.

These three girls are fighting patriarchy, searching for family and community, and trying to save the environment. The commentary on AI is a warning about what could happen if we start relying on it for everything, and seeing it as the be all and end all. It examines how we interact with the world around us, and what happens when some things are left unfettered and taking over everything to the point it’s all accepted. Until people decide it’s time to fight back.

Aleita becomes involved in a project that supposed to stop the jolts that remind her about things she’s not ready to think about yet, but things get complicated when the system is hijacked. This read like a warning about our reliance on technology, and how we assume it will solve everything and yet we can’t get away from it, even today. In Aleita’s world, it is constant. Miri lives in a world where it is on the precipice. Sylvie’s world is one where the technology of spinning is questioned, where people don’t believe what she has done, and this links the other two characters.

The book grapples with AI, patriarchy, trees, the environment, libraries, fairytales, motherhood, fibrecrafts, Carl Jung and the different kinds of love that we experience in our lives. It’s an intriguing and deftly told verse novel that captures so many things across three perspectives in an evocative and thought-provoking way. Each of the girls has a voice. They have something to say and are empowered to make their own decisions.

Their experiences of being women, and what people expect them to do is universal, something that everyone can relate to, because there is always the sense that people will take advantage of us, and technology can just make that so much easier.

This book is intriguing and exquisite, with warnings about not letting one system take advantage of everyone, and what can happen if we set our minds to creating something meaningful. It is a reminder of the importance and strength of human creativity in all its facets. It’s a celebration of womanhood and creativity, and everything that we can do to keep ourselves and the world safe.