Just One Day

There are books that you read & then there are books that completely consume you and you feel.  I've never once written a book review.  Ok that's probably a lie.  I'm sure there were many times in my academic career where I had to write some type of book report.  I've never done it on here though, & I've never done it just because.  With that said, this probably won't turn out anything like a stereotypical book review either.

I could give you the basic plot line of the book, the parts I enjoyed, the parts I didn't so much enjoy, but I'm not going to.  Instead I'm just going to talk about why I felt myself consumed by it.

Ok ok I'll tell ya what it says on the back so you can decide if it sounds like it'd be something you'd be into...

"Allyson Healy'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 invites 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, identify, and the "accidents" of fate.  Just One Day shows us how sometimes in order to get found, you first have to get lost...and how often the people we are seeking are much closer than we know."

This book is not what I thought it would be.  I found it in the teeny-bopper section...whatever it's actually called...young adult?  That's where I get a lot of my books from so I expected to read the same basic plot line that many of them seem to have.

When the book ended I was so choked up, like near tears, felt like a zombie because it was over, choked up.  It doesn't exactly tell you how it ends but you can kind of guess because there's a sequel called Just One Year.  The thing is, I don't know that I want to read the sequel.  I don't want to know what happens.  Not right now anyway.

Was the story good?  Sure.  Ok better than sure.  It was good.  It wasn't the specifics of the story that I necessarily loved but more so the idea behind it.  The moral of the story.  The idea that anything can happen in just one day.  The idea that every yes or no, every this way or that way, every decision you make can completely alter your life.

I was talking to a someone a few days back about how I wanted 2015 to be a year of change.  As cliche as it is I for once really wanted a "new year, new me".  I want a year that isn't so planned and plotted.  I want a year of taking chances and risks.  I am moving back to Minnesota and I don't have a plan.  Whatever happens, happens.  Instead of staying on the straight & narrow, always playing it safe, focusing on all of the reasons doing something isn't logical or may be scary, I just want to do them.

I don't read my horoscope religiously, or necessarily take it seriously, but I do read it from time to time.  Sometimes it's obviously way off base & other times it's scary how accurate it actually is.  I was about halfway through the book (I read it in less than 24 hours by the way...not that it's a hard read or anything...I just haven't felt a book so much in recent history to the point I've gotten through it that quickly) when I decided to read what 2015 was to have in store for me.  This is what I found:

You don't have to read it all, or at all.  Essentially it talks about what I had already decided.  A "total reinvention of who you are & how you want the world to see you" and "breaking free from the limitations of fear, darkness and insecurity."

Choosing that book at random while at Target, simply because I needed a new book for my flight back to Minnesota, seems like one of the "accidents" in life that the book talks about.  Maybe I'm just being romantic because of the new year & it always puts people in a mood of excitement & possibility.  It's been a long time since I read something that so perfectly explained exactly what I feel & what I've been looking for, especially without being direct about it.

The book pushed my sort of plan for a theme of change in the new year over the edge.  I don't want to know what happens next.  I don't want to plan every detail of my life like I so often do.  I want to experience all the possibilities that life as to offer & see exactly what can happen in just one day...