One Day

Title: One Day
Author: David Nicholls
Published: 2009
Read: December 2010
Number of pages: 435
Fiction
Where I got the book: Amazon.com
How I discovered it: Entertainment Weekly gave it an A in their book reviews and raved about it in a couple different issues.
My grade: A

The one day in question in One Day is July 15th. The book, set in Britian, starts on that day in 1988 and the leads, Emma Morley and Dexter Meyhew, have just met and have a one-night stand after their college graduation. Being that this was their first time together and how different they are - Emma comes from a working-class family and lacks self-confidence while Dexter comes from a well-to-do family and revels being the life of the party, one would think they would never see each other again, but they become friends and over the next twenty years we see how their relationship unfolds each year on the fifteenth of July.

The story is told in third person, mostly from Emma's and Dexter's point of views, but the reader sometimes views the story through a couple of the minor characters' POVs. This may be a love story, but don't expect the leads to fall in love and get together within the first fifty pages (um, hi, Twilight!) There is an initial attraction between the two leads, but Nicholls lets Dexter and Emma find themselves before he allows them to find each other.

Not too surprising, this is being made into a movie with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess as the leads. I hope that Anne will do a British accent and they don't make Emma an American like they did with Hilary Swank in P.S. I Love You. Also, the premise for the movie on IMDB says that Dexter and Emma "reunite one day each year for the next twenty years", but that isn't true. They're still in contact the other 364 days of the year; we as the reader are only seeing what happens on July 15th, so I hope they didn't change it for the movie.

One Day had me laughing out loud a few times; something that rarely happens when I read a book, but it also made me choke up, so you could say the novel is a roller coaster of emotions. One of my favorite chapters (which takes place in 1998) is when Dexter is dating this girl from a rich family. He's having dinner with her family and her younger twin brothers are giving him a really hard time. The entire family plus Dexter ends up playing a "parlour game" called "Are You There, Moriarty?" and let's just say if this isn't in the movie, I'm not going to be happy!

Check out this book and definitely try to read it before anyone can spoil the ending for you.