![\"\"](\"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/every-day.jpg\" "\\"every")
<\/a>Published by Chatto & Windus 7 June\u00a02012<\/strong><\/p>\n272 pp, trade paperback,\u00a0\u00a312.99<\/strong><\/p>\n Reviewed by John Petherbridge<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n The back cover of Every Day, Every Hour,<\/em>\u00a0Nata\u0161a Dragni\u0107\u2018s \u00a0first novel,\u00a0describes the book as, \u2018An irresistible romance which heralds the summer; the perfect holiday read.\u2019 Not for me, it isn\u2019t.\u00a0 My perfect holiday reads are long, challenging books, preferably with a foreign setting, which need the extra reading time and space a good holiday provides. \u00a0The only challenging element in Nata\u0161a Dragni\u0107\u2019s novel is the chronological jumps from one place and period to another.<\/p>\n The\u00a0book tells the story of Dora and Luka who live with their families in the Croatian seaside town of Makarska.\u00a0 They meet on Dora\u2019s first day at nursery school.\u00a0 Dora is two years old and Luka is five. \u00a0Luka faints and he is revived by two-year-old Dora murmuring, \u2018You are my sleeping beauty, only mine, wake up, my prince, you are my prince, only mine.\u2019 Surprisingly Luka recovers and a beautiful friendship is born which lasts throughout the novel despite the numerous difficulties which threaten to derail it.<\/p>\n Despite the age difference, Luka and Dora are inseparable until, in 1968, four years after their initial meeting, Dora and her family leave Makarska to settle in Paris where Dora\u2019s architect father has a new job. In Paris Dora masters the French language and years later becomes an acclaimed actor.\u00a0 Meanwhile in Makarska, Dora\u2019s success as an actor is mirrored by Luka\u2019s success as painter.<\/p>\n Sixteen years later, in a Paris art gallery showing Luka\u2019s work, they meet again.\u00a0 Just as he did twenty years earlier, Luka faints and is revived by Dora murmuring, \u2018You are my sleeping beauty…’ etc.\u00a0 Despite both Dora and Luka having other romantic entanglements they immediately become lovers.\u00a0 After a few months Luka returns alone to Makarska only to find that his former lover, Klara, is pregnant. And so on, for the next hundred and fifty pages, forwards and backwards between Paris and Makarska, Dora and Luka, despite marriages to other people and both wanted and unwanted pregnancies, struggle to establish the lasting relationship their souls cry out for.<\/p>\n The Yugoslav wars of the 90s hardly feature.\u00a0 Early on in the book Dora\u2019s mother, to her husband\u2019s consternation, demonstrates her Croatian nationalism by insisting on referring to\u00a0the Croatian town of Zagreb, rather than Belgrade, as the capital. But this is never followed up. Later in the book Luka joins the Croatian army but the political significance of this is ignored.\u00a0 During the siege of Dubrovnik he is wounded in the leg.\u00a0 He recovers and the only legacy of the war is his limp.<\/p>\n Every Day, Every Hour<\/em> is a love story which largely ignores the political and military situation of the period in which it is set.\u00a0\u00a0 By doing so it fails to live up to its blurb description as \u2018the perfect holiday read\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reviewed by John Petherbridge<\/p>\n The book tells the story of Dora and Luka who live with their families in the Croatian seaside town of Makarska. They meet on Dora\u2019s first day at nursery school. Dora is two years old and Luka is five. Luka faints and he is revived by two-year-old Dora murmuring, \u2018You are my sleeping beauty, only mine, wake up, my prince, you are my prince, only mine.\u2019 Surprisingly Luka recovers and a beautiful friendship is born which lasts throughout the novel despite the numerous difficulties which threaten to derail it.[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1798"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2963,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions\/2963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}