One Day by David Nicholls

One Day tells the story of two young people, Dexter and Emma, who briefly get together on their last day of Uni in 1988. David Nicholls uses the device of providing `snapshots’ of each of their lives on the same day in subsequent years to show us what happens to them along the way, teasing us with the “will they or won’t they” question at each stage.
Several reviews have criticised the book by saying that the story had been `done’ many times before; well, there are no `new’ stories in the world and it is the job of the writer to tell the story in a new, imaginative way which affects the reader and engages him.
For me, this didn’t quite do it.
I absolutely LOATHED Dexter. Search for `Gap Yah‘ on youtube and you’ll see why. He is everything I dislike in a character and I didn’t care what happened to him. Emma seemed `nice’. There you go.
I think it might be an age thing: perhaps I have been too long away from that period of my life to connect with these characters. I tend to believe that if they had been more sympathetically drawn, I’d have cared more.
I did enjoy it to a point. There is a Sad Moment near the end. I thought, “Oh, how sad.” But I didn’t cry and I have been known to cry at cartoons and Doctor Who.
A book for the young, I’d say.
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