Except loving well the people I loved the most,” she realizes while Eleanor’s friend Alonzo plays a magic trick on Timby. Anything I’d set out to achieve in this lifetime, I’d done it with grace to spare. My accomplishments? To most people they’d be the stuff of pipe dreams. Generally speaking, one survives,” says Eleanor, about having to buy clothes in the “chunky section” as a child. Semple throws in touching maxims that ring true but that in the end have no meaning given the context. Semple’s downfall lies in her failure to create depth, thus making moments of attempted profundity come across as scattered. While this is far from the first time that an author has included their characters’ art inside a novel, this artistic decision flows well enough that the reader can imagine a reality in which the drawings, and by extension Eleanor and her situation, seem real. Eleanor, for example, is trying to be a writer and graphic novelist, and Semple includes actual pages of her mini graphic novel, “The Flood Girls,” to substantiate and make Eleanor more tangible and real. Cow.’” Semple further actualizes her character by incorporating visuals to accompany the story. Some jokes describe moments that may actually have occurred in the lives of many of the parents reading the novel: “Timby said ‘Piper Veal called me a bad word… C.’ said, “A third grader called you the c-word?’ Timby replied, ‘Yeah. Or the gay and the gay,” says Eleanor about her gay former colleague and eight year-old son Timby who, based on the fact that he enjoys wearing makeup, Eleanor believes may be gay. I half expected a disco song to erupt, but instead it was giggles. Countless timely jokes that make the reader smile and serve to make Eleanor more accessible with their normality are interspersed throughout “Today Will Be Different.” “. One of Semple’s few successes is her ability to make Eleanor more personable to readers through witty humor. “Today Will Be Different” is ultimately too erratic to successfully build depth, despite the quirky style, humor, and relatability of its main character. However, the overall plot of this story lacks the coherence it needs to be an effective novel. Maria Semple’s third novel follows Eleanor Flood, a middle-aged, married mother who finds herself in the midst of a midlife crisis one morning, she decides she will change her monotonous life and tells herself, as the title indicates, that “Today Will Be Different.” After her previous novels, “This One Is Mine” and “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” (the latter of which is a national bestseller), Semple has built herself an impressive following of readers who love her stories for their middle-aged, married mother characters and for Semple’s entertaining style and timely humor.
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