Just One Year (Just One Day)

by Gayle Forman

[Suz @ Bookish Revelations]

Just One Year is a beautifully written magical story exploring the choices that we make as individuals and the random accidents that often happen in our lives. Sometimes these choices can bring us much happiness and other times it can bring us greater sorrow. Gayle Forman shows us that sometimes losing yourself to the sorrow that you've endured only to find yourself happy in the end, can be one of the best random accidents to ever happen to in your life. It is what you make of yourself when you do finally figure out who you are, that counts the most. This novel is one of the most beautiful reflections of that and one of the most inspiring reads that I've encountered all year.

Just One Year broke my feels in so many wonderful heartfelt aching ways. I found myself connect with Willem's story so much easier than it was for me to connect with Allyson's in Just One Day. It was so tragic and filled with despair, that I found myself at times, wanting to wrap my arms around him just to keep him in place for just one moment in time instead of always running away and holding back so much of who he was. He simply isn't the jerk that readers were left to think he was at the end of Just One Day, he was so much more than that, broken in so many ways that were unimaginable and still trying to hold himself together. His life and the person he wanted to be, was so affected by that one day he spent in Paris with his Lulu.

By the time I was finished reading this book, I simply marveled at the way Forman was able to take a character that I had originally disliked by the end of Just One Day, and had given him so much depth and complicated layers of pain that I couldn't help but love him in spite of how things had originally appeared. The moment in the novel where he finally broke down and called his mother, saying that he needed her was a real turning point for me. It was absolutely heartbreaking to see the two of them work through resolving their issues and grief, in order to make their relationship stronger and more healthy. Love in many forms played an intricate role in Just One Year and it was beautiful to see how it unfolded in its many manifestations, love of a long time friend, being inspired by a stranger who becomes a new friend, experiencing your life being altered by just one day with someone who "stains" you forever, familial love that is both lost and grieved and repaired.

Gayle Forman has a beautiful way with words of wisdom and self-reflection that lends such an emotional tone to the novel. Just One Year is a gorgeous character study on losing everything there is about yourself, only to find it reflected back in the eyes of the person who challenges and inspires you to find yourself. When an author is able to tap into that much emotion, it is a true mark of greatness in the words they have written. Beautifully thought provoking and bittersweet, this novel is a definite must read. I realize that it is a companion novel to Just One Day, but the emotional impact that this novel had on me personally has made it one of my top favorite books read this year.

If you are looking for one of those rare books that will stay with you, something gorgeously profound and poignant in all of the right ways a novel of this kind should be, then Just One Year is a book that I would recommend a place on your shelf. Bittersweet and powerfully emotional, you will not want to miss a minute of this diamond in a mountain of gold.