Holds Growing for ONE DAY
David Nicholls’ third novel, One Day came out in the US last Tuesday. That also happens to be the day news broke that Anne Hathaway has signed to play the lead in a movie based on the book. The director is Lone Scherfig, who was nominated for an Oscar last year for An Education.
One Day begins with two people who end up in bed together on the night they graduate from university. They are obviously wrong for each other, but there is chemistry. Over the next twenty years, they keep running in to each other. The story unfolds by showing where the characters are on a single day, July 15, of each of those twenty years.
Are you thinking When Harry Met Sally? You’re not the only one, Entertainment Weekly‘s review begins, “David Nicholls owes a plot finder’s fee to When Harry Met Sally…”
The book, released in last year in the UK, was a #1 best seller there and has received a warm welcome on this side of the Atlantic. The author was interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, by an obviously charmed Scott Simon. Entertainment Weekly, which gives it an A- (with no clear reason for withholding a full A), calls it an “irresistible way-we-were novel …the perceptive English novelist and screenwriter has a gift for zeitgeist description and emotional empathy that’s wholly his own…a nuanced love story disguised as a beach read.” The NYT Book Review is equally smitten.
The Boston Globe, however, feels the author suffers from being too “risk-averse to veer too far from… safe and recognizable convention,” but ends up being won over because, “despite the story at times feeling predictable, merely readable, something happens toward the end that changes things…in its final pages…it has taken your heart and crushed it.”
The book rose to #21 on Amazon this weekend; libraries are showing holds of 10:1 on light ordering.
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