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February 9, 2011

Em and Dex. Dex and Em.


PhotobucketIt happens quite often that I judge a book by its cover, which is also what happened with this book. The first time I saw it was in a bookshop in the airport in Singapore, while I was waiting for my flight home. I had been running around in the airport for hours, just to stay awake, so I decided to check out the bookshop even though I already had an unread book in my luggage. And then the cover of this book, "One Day" by David Nicholls, caught my eye, but I didn't buy it (mostly because of the unread book mentioned before).
It's almost a year ago now, but when I saw the book again at the library, the cover still appealed to me, so I brought it with me home. And I read it - and finally, here comes the point of this post; some sort of  recommendation (which I'm not good at writing at all).

The structure of this book is rather special, as every time a new chapter starts a whole year has gone by, ergo all the chapters start on the 15th of July (or was it the 14th? Doesn't matter). In the beginning I didn't like that, but when I got used to it, it didn't matter that much to me. Enough about structure (this is not a school project, mind you).
We're following the two friends Emma and Dexter from their graduation and 20 years ahead, sometimes their paths cross and sometimes they don't (I don't want to spoil anything, so I'm finding it a bit hard to tell you the story line -  as I said I'm a really bad reviewer!). But it's not a typical love story.

The further I got into the book, the more I liked it - until the end, when the story takes a completely unexpected turn. It was kind of shocking, actually. Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention to the words I read, because I was just reading (surprise!) and then I read the fatal sentence and I was just thinking "WHAT?!", so I had to read the whole page again to realize what just happened. I really didn't see that coming at all. And then I wondered how the author could let this happen? So annoying. Because of this event, I didn't like the rest of the book, so now I'm having a hard time deciding if I like it or not...

I wouldn't say it's a "totally brilliant book" as it is stated on the cover, but I think you should read it, if only to find out what the mysterious event in the end was about.
(If you want to read a proper review, you can find one here)
[Photo source: the guardian]

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