Just One Day
"Allyson Healey's life is exactly like her suitcase-packed, planned, ordered. Then on the last day of her three-week post-graduation European tour, she meets Willem. A free-spirited, roving actor, Willem is everything she's not, and when he invited her to abandon her plans and come to Paris with him, Allyson says yes. This uncharacteristic decision leads to a day of risk and romance, liberation and intimacy: twenty-four hours that will transform Allyson's life. A book about love, heartbreak, travel, identity, and the "accidents" of fate . . . this novel shows that sometimes in order to get found, you first have to get lost."
Just One Day by Gayle Forman awakened my inner wanderlust and made me oddly nostalgic of my very first heartbreak, and the road to recovery from something that is once foreign to all of us. I enjoyed the parallels of Shakespearian tragedy and comedy throughout the entire piece-although the trajectory of the story teeters on this line the entire way through. This one is about learning to be and to truly submit oneself to circumstance and fate; and sometimes be blessed with incredible acts of circumstance in the process. The romanticism, human kindness, and literary love thoroughly charmed me.
This is one of the few novels I've read that indulges the reader with a second just as the story climaxes. Anyone who has known love will be able to see themselves in Allyson as she embraces the unruly unknown; in all of her beauty and atrocities. Reading in real-time as this once-naive girl becomes a woman and finds her sense of self is (although painful at times) liberating and delightfully relatable. Coming to grips with the potentiality of truth is hard, but necessary. This one has pulled me in and I will definitely be indulging in the sequel.