One Day in December

nice holiday reading

Can’t go wrong with a Reese’s Book Club book. This novel is a lovely romance novel. Read in the winter or during any season!

I loved this book. I couldn’t put it down. Well written. Definitely recommend!

Loved the characters and how the story of their love builds

Usually I am always up for a good holiday story: but, this book felt flat to me. I had a hard time getting into it. This was our book club pick for December. The writing was good; except that it seemed like the 2 main characters, Laurie and Jack, had the same “voice”. If the headers at the top of the sections didn’t say which characters p-o-v it was, you wouldn’t have known from their “voice” in the written word. I also had no connection to the characters and therefore, couldn’t care about them. More often than not, I felt like throttling Jack and telling Laurie to be honest with her BFF, Sarah. Of course, then there might mot have been much of a story to tell… Perhaps this just wasn’t my “cup of tea” and someone else might love it.

It takes place mostly in London. There are some forays out to Australia, Thailand, Scotland, and Birmingham (England).

This story is a mix of instant love and a slow burn romance.
I love both, but in this book the slow burn was closing in on being painful.
In the end I enjoyed following Lu and the different stages of her life.
I liked the new year resolutions – Keep on swimming!
And then the end! Sigh… Wish the end could have been a little longer, this book ended too quickly

As ONE DAY IN DECEMBER story begins, twenty-two-year-old Laurie gazes out a bus window and settles her eyes on a man who gazes back. It’s an intense moment between them, an immediate connection, and then the bus moves on, and Laurie spends the next year searching for “Bus Boy” in bars and public spaces. When she finally meets him again, however, it’s under the worst of circumstances—her best friend Sarah introduces Laurie to him as Jack, her new boyfriend. The story then follows the paths that Sarah, Laurie, and Jack’s lives take over the course of the next ten years, through love and friendship and heartbreak. This is the first book that ever made me cry in the MIDDLE, and that just goes to show how deeply Josie Silver embeds her characters into your heart. And those characters are flawed (one significantly more than the others, in my opinion), but that only makes you root for them more, because they feel so much like real people, sometimes enduring the most heartbreaking situations of all, other times sharing their joy with each other. To say this book is “addictive” isn’t enough; when I had to put it down, I couldn’t stop thinking about it or wondering what the characters would do next. I even dreamed about it! And though it’s sometimes difficult for me to stay engaged when a book makes significant jumps through time, the structure worked perfectly for this story and actually made it MORE compelling, as we meet each time jump with curiosity over how each relationship has fared in the months that have passed. Simply put: I LOVED reading this book; every moment of it, even when I was wiping away tears, was a pleasure to experience, and I can’t wait for Josie Silver’s next novel.

I bought this book because I thought it was a Christmas novel. I don’t read romance books ever. I was pleasantly surprised at this one. There was none of the usual predictable plot lines. The characters were well developed and I loved the way it was written. The author wrote the story in narrative fashion from the point of view of two of the main characters. I really enjoyed reading this gem of a novel.

I really became emotionally involved with the characters and the predicaments in which they found themselves.

Frustrating- took forever for couple to unite