One Day

Undoubtedly one of the most intense books I’ve read in a while. I was expecting a heartfelt love story, and while I got that, I also got so much more: heartbreak, anxiety, familiarity, sadness, happiness, madness...and so many other things that I just couldn’t put it down, and when I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even when I finished it, it ended on such a note that I carried the book with me for weeks just to go over my favourite parts whenever I wanted.

It left me with a knot in my stomach more than once, and there were times I just wanted to pull a "Joey Tribbiani" and put the book to rest in the freezer - to give me time to think and absorb what had just happened. I can’t imagine anyone reading this and not feeling like they know Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew. At a certain point near the end I had to put it down and take a breath and leave it there for a couple of hours because I was so mad - and also because I wanted to not know the end for a little while (like I did with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I only read the Epilogue twelve hours after I had read the end because I wanted to drag it out for as long as I could).

After a while into the book you stop wishing for the end to come, when you will see the outcome of all the complications of the connections linking these two souls, and start hoping to see more of their friendship and how they are never on the same track but are always there for each other regardless, how their minds are so different but they can put ideas and controversies aside for the sake of their relationship (well, most of the time anyway). I was surprised by how real they felt to me and how they reminded me so much of myself. I feel like David Nicholls have written down my very own story and my future in this book. I'm not going to lie, I was scared. I may not be in the best state of mind with all the conflicting feelings that i have right now, but when I believe that my life, in some odd way, will turn exactly like in the book my gut feeling had never failed to prove me wrong.

There’s a quote from Tony Parsons, author of Man and Boy, on the back of the book that says, “The best weird love story since The Time Traveler’s Wife.” While I don’t think Emma and Dex’s story is as weird as Clare and Henry’s, I definitely agree that it is just as remarkable. I have made this book my bible for life.

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And yes, for all you non-bookworm people the movie just came out in theater. Saw it. Did not hate it. Jim Sturgess was toohotforwords. I cried for a good 5 min because seeing the scenes on screen brought back so many memories. It highlighted major events from the book but I still strongly recommend that you should get a copy yourself and read. Hollywood always end up butchering novels anyway.