One Day

One Day
Author: David Nichols 2009 425 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started September 2 2010, Finished September 4 2010

This story follows the lives of two English friends, Emma and Dexter, for twenty years, starting from the day of their college graduation. While I occasionally found it humorous, generally I found its plot and insights unremarkable and predictable -- nothing new here -- and the characters, particularly Dexter, not explored deeply enough to be fully believable/relatable. However, much to my surprise, the book rallied at the end, achieving considerable emotional affect by the trick of bringing the story back to the very beginning, a sort of prolog as epilog. The author’s trick of taking us back to the beginning, when the reader knows what fate has is store for the characters, but they don’t, imbues all that has gone before with a powerful poignancy and deep saddness.