Sweet Sorrow

February 10, 2020
A teenager experiences heady first love amid an amateur Shakespeare production in this amusing coming-of-age novel from Nicholls (One Day). Sixteen-year-old Charlie Lewis, certain he failed his school exams, spends the summer of 1997 working under the table at a small-town gas station, “too far away from London to be a suburb” and “too developed to count as countryside.” There, he avoids caring for his unemployed father while stealing small sums of cash to cover household expenses. When he meets Fran Fisher, a girl his age from a much nicer private school, he gets swept into participating in a production of Romeo and Juliet. Fran and Charlie have delightful banter as their attraction blooms, and he builds rapport with the other actors while hiding his participation from his boorish school friends. After his boss uncovers his gas station thefts, the fallout has consequences, not the least being the ruin of a carefully planned weekend of sexual exploration with Fran. While the story lopes along fairly predictably, Nicholls excels at capturing Charlie’s insecurity, the messy exuberance of first love, and the coarseness of teenage male friendships. This doesn’t quite reach the heights of Nicholls’s previous work, but it is a good deal of fun. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents.

March 1, 2020
Nicholls' leisurely, nostalgic, and often amusing novel traces the coming-of-age of an adolescent boy in 1997 Britain. The author of Us (2014) homes in on one mildly eventful summer. Sixteen-year-old Charlie Lewis, looking back from a point 20 years in the future, has just finished secondary school in a little town "too far away from London to be a suburb, too large to be a village, too developed to count as countryside." Anxious about his parents' recent separation, which has left him alone to cope with his unemployed, clinically depressed father, he hasn't been paying attention in school and flubbed his exams, making it unlikely that he will head off to university with his friends. When he's not working a few hours a week under the table at a local gas station, where he nets some extra money by pulling off a low-level scam, he's left with plenty of time on his hands. One day, after sneaking into a local estate to sit in the grass and read a Vonnegut novel, he meets and falls hard for upper-class, relatively sophisticated Fran Fisher. She agrees to go out with him for coffee a week later on the condition that he join in a local summer production of Romeo and Juliet in which she is playing Juliet. Reluctantly, he does so and learns to love Shakespeare as well as Fran. Narrator Charlie, now happily on the brink of marrying someone else, looks back on this period of his life with affection and a touch of compassion for the bewildered boy he used to be. While the narrative stakes aren't very high and the plot ambles through some predictable paces, the developing relationship between the two young lovers is charming, with none of the feverish highs or lows of the play they often reference. Charlie and his theatrical colleagues make good company, and even the fraught family situation is satisfactorily resolved. An old-fashioned, endearing romance for readers with time to spare.

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Starred review from March 15, 2020
Lounging in tall grass in a quiet corner of his small, English town, certain that he failed his end-of-school exams and is headed precisely nowhere, Charlie doesn't realize he's trespassing on the rehearsals for a summer production of the ultimate tragic romance. Out of nowhere appears Fran, Juliet of course, who trips and falls, and that's it. Love at first sight will make a sullen teenager do crazy things, even join a socially unacceptable theatre troupe. It would be fair to guess what happens next, right down to Charlie's casting as Benvolio and some magnificent usage of Shakespeare's text. There's so much readers won't expect, though, dramas of all sorts, and so much bittersweet joy in Nicholl's telling. As Charlie, on the eve of marriage 20 years later, recalls that positively life-altering summer, Nicholls' (Us, 2014; One Day, 2010) addictive story is as much about time's passage as it is about love of many kinds. He collapses years and draws out hours, like love does, and keeps up a briskly paced structural sleight of hand in Charlie's leaps through his memory. With fully fleshed-out characters, terrific dialogue, bountiful humor, and genuinely affecting scenes, this is really the full package of a rewarding, romantic read.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Already a bestseller in the UK, this will easily work its way into US readers' hearts just like Nicholls' previous books have.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)