Book Review: One Day by David Nicholls

I promised on Twitter I would have reviewed the last book I have read, One Day by David Nicholls so here we go, this is just an exercise in reviewing, I am not sure if I'm any good at it, but let's give this blog a little bit more substance than pictures.

From Amazon

What attracted me to reading this book was:
1) the author wrote Starter For Ten, which I haven't read, but I have seen the film, a pleasant and funny British comedy talking about a very British phenomenon: University Challenge.
2) it had good words from Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons, two of the most successful British Novelists of the past decade and a half.

So, happy to immerse in yet another novel set in familiar places, I bought it from Amazon full of expectations, and I found it at home waiting for me when I came back from my summer months in Italy.
The story is simple, two people, Dexter and Emma, from two different backgrounds, spend on night together at university, on graduation day, to be precise. From that first day together they decide to be friends and the book follows their development in life dedicating every chapter to a subsequent year, always on the 15th of July, St. Swithin day.
The idea is original, I think, and the narrative runs easy and fluid, although so full of clichés that it made me want to throw the book against my bedroom wall every other chapter: he is the rich and screwed up one, who ruins all relationships around him, sleeps around, gets drunk, bla bla, she is the sensible teacher cum struggling young adult writer, who tries to leave a mark in the lives of those around her, ends up in a boring relationship, then succeeds in publishing books, then... I have to stop here, or I will spoil the "surprise" of what happens at the end.
Except, the inevitable doesn't happen at the end, Nicholls must have thought, rightly, that the story was not that original after all and added a "twist" at the end. Well, the twist certainly left me with a hell of a bitter aftertaste, and I wish I had defenestrated the book before finding out what happens.

Overall vote: 5.5/10

Next I am reading the last chapter in the incredibly grippy Swedish crime saga Millennium: The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson. It's gonna take me eons, as I own it in hardback format and I am only reading it at night before falling asleep. Not a long time when you have an 11 months old...