A PR triumph

By Brian Clegg

I get a lot of press releases, but I have enjoyed few more than one I recently got from a book review website called Summary Guru, which site carries the headline ‘GET INSPIRATION FOR YOUR PAPER WITH AI POWERED BOOK SUMMARIES & ANALYSIS – PLAGIARISM FREE’ (Does inspiration need to be plagiarism free? Or just stuff you copy and paste?)

To demonstrate the effectiveness of Summary Guru, the release tells us ‘Before Watching Netflix’s One Day, Know These Five Fascinating Details From The Book’ – details produced by Summary Guru. Here they are, with a few of my comments:

1. It’s about a single day… across twenty years

To be honest, if you don’t know this before watching the series, you haven’t being paying attention.

2. It deeply explores relationships

This is illustrated with ‘To quote Emma (the novel’s main female character): “Dexter, I love you so much…and I probably always will. I just don’t like you anymore. I’m sorry.”’ Yep, deep.

3. The book is rich in philosophy

Take a sabbatical, philosophy lecturers. Apparently ‘Nicholls sprinkles many philosophical ideas through the book, highlighted by quotes such as, ‘’I think reality is overrated’’ and ‘’There is always joy in witnessing the joy of others.”’ Wow, why did I bother reading philosopher Philip Goff’s book on the purpose of the universe?

4. It’s light and dark.

This a real step forward for a fiction title, I think. We should see more of it, novelists.

5. There are bursts of humour

We are told ‘But it’s not all doom and gloom; here are two light-hearted quotes that illustrate how funny Nicholls’s prose can be:

• “Oh, you know me. I have no emotions. I’m a robot. Or a nun. A robot nun.”
• “Call me sentimental, but there’s no one in the world that I’d like to see get dysentery more than you.”

LOL.

I know press releases are easy targets, but this feels more like a parody than the real thing. Perhaps it was intended as irony, but I’m not sure it was.

In case the release inspires you to get a copy of One Day, it is available from amazon.co.uk, amazon.com and bookshop.org

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.