Schaffert, Timothy. Devils in the Sugar Shop. Denver: Unbridled Books, 2006.

There is a lot of value to be had in novels that take place inside of a single day. First, one gets a nice and clear idea about a story's duration. The end of novels is always a certain amount of tangible pages away, but with novels of this type those pages become almost like countable minutes in a way I at least find a bit exhilarating. This is the second thing one gets from reading one-day books: the exhilaration of novelty and literary feats. It's a lot easier to set a story in Sometime and allow successive scenes to contain between them a period not much better delineated than as A While. It's hard to not waste time. It's very hard to make one character's hour seem just as engaging as the one before it.

And so this is the third thing. If one's to believe as I do that novels are the best way to learn about what's good about ourselves then novels that take place in a day are extremely valuable things, because if there's only one case they make it's a case for the dramatic thrill of the everyday. Schaffert's novel has moments that may never enter into the life of any of us, here—a suburban swingers party, a septuagenarian dropping her drawers atop a coffee table, adulterous liaisons—but for the most part what pulled me so quickly forward to the end of his narrative and his characters' day was the easy honesty of a simple conversation had across a table by two old friends.

Were it not this late in the evening and were I a better-read man I'd use this to make a case that it's women and women's writing or chick-lit or female characters or what have you that are far better equipped (Sorry, Ulysses!) to handle the one-day novel than men are.