One Day in December by Josie Silver – 1 Stars

[Hannah]

I didn’t go into One Day in December with particularly high expectations - it’s not the sort of book I usually pick up - but even so, I found it deeply frustrating. The story is built around an eye-rollingly unrealistic premise: Laurie sees a man through a bus window and immediately decides he’s the love of her life. That alone was hard to take seriously. Falling in love with someone you’ve never spoken to, based on a two-second glance? It just didn’t feel believable at all.

Things only got more irritating from there. When Laurie finally sees this mystery man again, he turns out to be her best friend’s new boyfriend. What follows is years of pining, poor decisions, and a string of melodramatic moments that could have been avoided entirely if any of the characters behaved like actual adults. The emotional stakes never felt genuine because the whole thing was built on such a flimsy foundation.

Worse still, the moral compass of the main characters is all over the place. If someone is truly your best friend, you don’t go around kissing their boyfriend—especially not while still pretending everything’s fine. That behaviour isn’t romantic or complicated, it’s just selfish.

The writing itself is easy enough to read, but it doesn’t do much to elevate the story. The characters felt flat, the dialogue was repetitive, and the pacing dragged on for far too long. I struggled to care about any of it. All in all, this book wasn’t for me, and I’d struggle to recommend it to anyone who prefers stories with believable relationships or characters who show a bit of integrity.