One Day - David Nicholls

It's 1988 and Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley have only just met. But after only one day together, they cannot stop thinking about one another. Over twenty years, snapshots of that relationship are revealed on the same day — July 15th — of each year. Dex and Em face squabbles and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears. And as the true meaning of this one crucial day is revealed, they must come to grips with the nature of love and life itself.

I enjoyed parts of this book, but there were also parts I found rather... tiresome. In particular, Dexter's drunken exploits got old real fast, and it rapidly became incomprehensible why Emma would continue to have anything to do with him. I could see it if they'd already been friends forever when he started exhibiting signs of alcoholism, but I don't know. If I'd just met someone and they were pretty much drunk all the time, I'm just not sure I'd pursue the relationship very far. But who knows. Life does work in mysterious ways sometimes. And when there's chemistry, there's chemistry. Not much you can do about that.

In any case, I feel I'm not really spoiling anything when I say that they do eventually get together, and I guess I was happy those two kids finally got themselves in sync, but then there was the ending. Oh my god.

*** Spoiler follows. ***

I hate it when authors just up and kill off a main character. I mean, sure, it's an effective endpoint for a story, but ugh. I just hate that it comes out of nowhere (even though I realize that yes, sometimes it does in real life, too). "Then one day she was hit by a truck and died." What? It just seems so lazy, like the author couldn't figure out how else to end the story. And as for the "true meaning of this one crucial day," if this one crucial day is supposed to be the day she dies, I kind of wish that they didn't happen to meet on that same day, exactly twenty years earlier. If the end point was supposed to be the big thing about that day, then the first day should have been just some random day sometime after they'd first met. To bookend their whole relationship so perfectly like that made it feel too much like everything was tied up with a neat little bow.

*** Spoiler concluded. You can read the rest. ***

So yeah. Hated the end, and didn't really get into the rest of it either (although the chapter on Emma's reactions to other people's babies was so exactly my own thoughts on the subject that I laughed aloud), but conceptually, this book was a neat idea. And Dexter did have his charming moments, in spite of it all. I've read worse.