June 1, 2026
One Day Hard and Clear, by Anne Baldo
Where do I even begin to tell you about how much I love this book?
Perhaps with the email I received three summers ago by editor Stephanie Small telling me about the short story collection, Morse Code for Romantics, by debut author Anne Baldo, a collection whose excellence was so sustained, and which was steeped in nostalgia, hot summers, and had me feeling as delightfully spent at the end as a long day at the beach.
And then with the experience I had the summer after that where I had the opportunity to work with Baldo on her next manuscript, a brutally glorious book that glittered, light reflected from the kind of edges that most people take for granted, don’t even pay attention to, but in an Anne Baldo sentence, they shine.
Then there was last summer, when I didn’t have an Anne Baldo book to read at all, but we don’t have to focus on that part of the story BECAUSE, One Day Hard and Clear is out today. The published version of that book I read two years ago and I’m so thrilled how it’s turned out, how it’s even more wonderful than it was on my first encounter, how that incredible cover sets you up for all the goodness this novel holds inside, it’s sepia tone, the stupid recklessness, female friendship, the posturing, and the heart at its core which is aching, human, and true.
One Day, Hard and Clear is about Sami, who has just finished high school in Windsor and dreams of escaping that world to Paris with her best friend Lucy, whose mother has never quite thought Sami was the right kind of friend for her daughter. And as the distance between them becomes clearer, Lucy moving into a different kind of realm as she pursues her university studies, Sami turns to True, with whom she’d once been a couple, but even after that was over, they’ve never been able to escape each other. Not even after Sami takes up with Bodie, who’s a wildcard, but such a predictable wildcard that he’s never going to really disappoint her, because she knows he only ever will.
Moving through the first decade of the century, the novel tells Sami’s story with extraordinary clarity of vision, her point of view understated but so tremendously defined, the power and beauty of Baldo’s prose underlining all of this. (“I’d stop calling True, I promised myself. Stop being like the sea, lovesick for the moon/ They say the moon, as it now is, was formed in the wreckage of a collision, millions of years ago, all the dust and debris transforming, out of devastation, into something luminous and new.”)
Rife with pop culture references, sympathetic Britney references, LFO playing in the background, characters who are so unbearably realized, reaching for each other but unable to connect—the tension of that. The brilliance of these sentences. The details with which Baldo builds her fictional world, it is all of just so wonderful, and I am so excited for the rest of you to discover it all.
