Willem’s “smile unfurls like a sail,” “his thousand shades of laughter” make her swoon, his kiss “breaks open the sky.” Phrases like this wouldn’t be out of place in a third-rate romance novel, but in one with literary ambition and psychological depth they ring especially false.Īllyson’s attraction to Willem is understandable, however, because we see how he’s calculated to win an insecure girl’s heart. Then there is the unfortunate matter of what he does to Forman’s prose.

This is, alas, no literary “Before Sunrise.” Willem’s abrupt changes of mood, his frequent evasions and the plot’s melodramatic twists mar the ostensibly “perfect day.” And while Willem may liberate her from the weight of expectation, he also brings out the worst in Allyson: her flirtatious banter is cloying, and he makes her anxious, jealous, even paranoid well before he abandons her. Is it really romantic to be known only by someone else’s nickname? To listen to hackneyed lines like “I go where the wind blows me” and “You have to surrender yourself to the chaos”? To think of love as “a stain”? He calls her Lulu, the nickname of the silent film actress Louise Brooks, and neither asks her real name nor discloses much about himself.Īllyson struggles with whether Willem is playing her, and when she wakes up after a night of passion to find him gone, she wonders how to interpret “his mysterious disappearance.” Was their time together a fake, or was it authentic and beautiful? Is Willem just a “sleazy scoundrel” or is he the sensitive, lonely soul she glimpsed beneath his “masks”? Was Lulu “just pretend” or is she an aspect of Allyson never before actualized?įorman is canny in endearing Willem to teenage hearts: he prefers a brunette without curves to a conventionally attractive blonde he praises Allyson’s good heart rather than her “pretty legs” he makes her feel as if “the world was full of nothing but possibility.” But the convention of forbidden, freeing love is remarkably stereotyped here. After seeing him perform in “Twelfth Night,” Allyson impulsively accepts Willem’s invitation to spend a day together in Paris. “Just One Day,” the new novel by Gayle Forman (author of the well-received “If I Stay” and “Where She Went”), has an epigraph from “As You Like It”: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” The story of Allyson, a “good girl” on a European tour, and Willem, an adventurous Dutch actor, is about playing and playacting in all their many senses.

Books by gayle forman