Review: One Day in December by Josie Silver
One Day in December by Josie Silver, narrated by Eleanor Tomlinson and Charlie Anson, was a New York Time's Bestseller and a Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection, which should have you eager to read it. Don’t.
I’ll tell you why. You may think about someone you saw at a bus stop periodically over the years, but you are not in love with them. You do not know them. They are a stranger.
If this trope isn’t bad enough, your best friend brings him home a year later as her boyfriend and makes and off-the-cuff remark about him being the one, and you don’t tell her that he is the “bus stop boy,” you are not mature enough to find “the one” or your “soulmate” or whatever you want to call it.
And yes, there is more — you spend 10 years pining and avoiding, only to marry someone else even after your best friend breaks up with “bus stop boy.”
That’s it. You spend the entire book watching them not have the courage to leap for one another — knowing full well that they love only that person. And Jack is not even worth it! All he cares about is women’s looks. Is this because he’s in love with Laurie — that’s what we’re supposed to think, but I didn’t buy it.
Onto the Good Stuff
You’re probably wondering why I kept reading at all. For me, it was the friendship between Sarah and Laurie that kept me reading. How would they weather the storm that was Jack. While I was disappointed that Laurie waited so long to tell her who Jack was, I wasn’t disappointed in how they interacted and grew as people inside and outside of their own orbits. These are friends for life - sisters who can argue and not talk for a long time, but ultimately patch things up.
It was the friendship that kept me turning the pages in One Day in December by Josie Silver.
Rating: Couplet
About the Author:
Josie lives in a small English town with her husband, their two sons, plus a changing cast of cats, dogs and fish. She writes full-time in a studio at the bottom of the garden.