A reviewer for Publisher's Weekly lamented that in This Year It Will Be Different the "tales are formulaic and superficial." Binchy's techniques were cited as the major reason for the weakness of this collection: "While the characters and their predicaments are potentially interesting, as soon as her narratives begin to develop, Binchy catapults forward to disappointingly simplistic endings. Readers will yearn for more: more character development, more detail, less fast-forwarding, fewer perky or maudlin conclusions. These tales are fine for a fast read during a busy season, but many will wish that Binchy had instead developed one of them into a novel that would do justice to her characters and themes."

Readers accustomed to Binchy's novels will be disappointed that in these stories, she lets the third-person omniscient narrator carry most of the storytelling load and compress the time-frames of the narratives. This technique creates stories that are...