At the opening of Anne Baldo’s debut novel, One Day, Hard and Clear, we are skimming late-night TV with Sami, who is painting her nails and talking to her ex-boyfriend True. She records that: “Any night you could flip through the channels, see Bill Cosby tell Sofia Vergara, ‘Men look at you, and only think of sin,’ and Janet Jackson appeal to Letterman not to make her relive it, as he keeps asking about the Super Bowl anyway. Leno joking about Monica Lewinsky getting her jaw wired shut and Howard Stern telling Courtney Love, ‘Just stand there for a second, let me look at you.’”
This is our introduction to the turn-of-the-millennium world of this novel: patriarchal capitalism devouring hypersexualized women, a boy who doesn’t want to be with Sami but wants to keep her entwined in his life forever, and Sami observing all this as she uses the first of many kinds of gloss, glitter, paint with which she and her best friend Lucy adorn themselves. (For someone who was roughly the protagonists’ age in this era, one of the pleasures of this novel was feeling the past sticking to me like thickest frosted lip gloss.) The rich descriptions of femme ritual, the girls’ self-creation through makeup and clothes, make us feel the power these objects possess, even as the language presents for scrutiny all their mass-produced cheapness, the chemical slick of Celestial Strawberry and Juicy Tube lip gloss, Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson perfume in which these young women marinate. Baldo has a brilliant eye for the telling detail, and she lends it to the novel’s primary narrator; in Sami’s bedroom, the local bar or mall, we are in the company of someone who knows – even if she doesn’t have fancy language for it – that class and gender are shaping everything about how she encounters the world.
For someone who was roughly the protagonists’ age in this era, one of the pleasures of this novel was feeling the past sticking to me like thickest frosted lip gloss.
Her world is rooted in Windsor, Ontario, an industrial city on Canada’s southern border that Baldo makes shine like a cellophane-wrapped candy apple. Sami, True, and Lucy are nineteen at the novel’s opening, straining against the limited opportunities this city provides – for jobs, for beauty, for love. The novel chronicles how these young people capitulate to or resist the constraints of their lives, exploring what – if any – abilities or twists of fate can free us from the course history has charted for us. Each of these characters is moved by beauty and knowledge in ways their provenances can’t account for, and which their lives do not cultivate. Moving with them into early adulthood, their choices made me think and broke my heart in equal measure.
Sami and Lucy, best friends since kindergarten, are working at a grocery store and saving to go to Paris. At night they make themselves glamorous and go out to their favourite bar. Lucy is in university; delicately blond and sheltered by her prissy mother, she is devoted to Sami, the bolder girl who got detention for rolling her school kilt and, though moved by classic literature, ended high school without knowing that the poet Shelley was a man – though she does know what to say when a boy you like asks you, on the phone, what you are wearing. After Sami, age nine, tells Lucy about periods, Lucy’s mother tells Sami that, “There are some things, young lady, you just shouldn’t talk about,” and Sami reflects that “‘Young man’ was a compliment, an honour, but even then I knew ‘young lady’ was different, cool and corrective. You only heard it when you were doing something wrong.”
Sami reflects that “‘Young man’ was a compliment, an honour, but even then I knew ‘young lady’ was different, cool and corrective. You only heard it when you were doing something wrong.”
Sami is smart, a born iconoclast in mall-bought clothes, with little regard for her own comfort. These are some of the reasons why she is bound to True, who loves etymology and fine linen but cannot escape the path beat for him by his womanizing, rootless father, to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. True is the focalizing consciousness for a portion of the book, but I still came away wishing I’d understood him better. Though perhaps, in the end, there wasn’t as much to understand as it seemed there might be, and the frustration I feel around his lack of substance is the right feeling for this character to evoke. In keeping herself mostly away from True, Sami creates a life shaped just like society predicted – but the beauty of her character is how she eludes definition by circumstance, how her perceptiveness places her beyond the constraints that appear to ensnare her.
Lucy, Sami’s other life-defining love, is not so fortunate, although her life would generally be considered the better one. From the novel’s description, theirs was the relationship I thought anchored the narrative, but painfully and inexorably, Lucy becomes peripheral to Sami’s story. While the causes and the nature of the distance between the two friends make sense, Lucy’s character ossifies around her obsession with a tiresome, polo-shirt-wearing boy who thinks her “faith in books” is adorable and ridiculous. The boy becomes metonymical for all the things that girls in this time and place are meant to want, and all the ways this world will strip them of their individuality. I believed it, entirely; I also wanted to know more about how Sami felt about it, though arguably her choices speak for themselves.
Reading this book, I kept thinking of conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s signs, posted around Manhattan in the late 1970s, reading “Protect Me From What I Want.” Every era produces its own glittering objects that promise to give beautiful form to our selves, and every new generation needs their own warnings to be wary of them. One Day, Hard and Clear conjures the desires and dangers of early-2000s life in crystalline clarity, makes us feel their sharp edges.
Anne Baldo is the author of the story collection Morse Code for Romantics. Her writing has appeared in Grain, Stanchion, and Riddle Fence. One Day, Hard and Clear is her debut novel. She lives in Windsor, Ontario.
Publisher: Dundurn Press (June 2, 2026)
Paperback: 6″ x 9″ | 240 pages
ISBN: 9781459756359
Samantha Annie Bernstein is the author of Here We Are Among the Living, Spit on the Devil and Kitchen Island Poems. Her writing has most recently appeared in Toronto Journal, Pinhole Poetry, and Canadian Theatre Review. She is an adjunct professor of English and Creative Writing at York University.
- Samantha Annie Bernsteinhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/samantha-annie-bernstein/
