ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Maybe One Day by Debbie Johnson @orionbooks #BlogTour
It’s my stop on the blog tour for Maybe One Day by Debbie Johnson and I’m sharing my thoughts about it today. My thanks to Alainna Hadjigeorgiou from Orion for the place on the tour and for sending a proof copy of the book for review purposes.
What if you had the chance to find a lost love?
Jess still thinks about the man who disappeared from her life seventeen years ago, and the tragedy that tore them apart. So when she discovers a hidden box of letters in her mother’s attic, Jess realises that the truth about why he walked away has been kept from her all this time.
Jess sets out to follow the faded postmarks across the country, determined that her journey will bring her closer to him. As each clue falls into place, Jess discovers new things about herself – and the man who once broke her heart. Maybe she can find him. Maybe their love story isn’t over.
Maybe one day, they will be together again…
I’m always on the lookout for books with a love story at the centre, preferably love against the odds or forbidden love. Maybe One Day very much fits into that category.
This is Jess’s story. As the book begins she’s just attended her mother’s funeral and for the first time in years she doesn’t really have a purpose. She’s late 30s and she’s accompanied back to the house she shared with her mother by her cousin, Michael, who is very early 20s. I really enjoyed the dynamics between these two characters who are old enough to be mother and son and yet have a really fun relationship.
They decide to look in the attic and find a shoebox of letters to Jess from Joe, the man she loved when she was at college. For some reason Joe disappeared from her life but here is the evidence that maybe it wasn’t quite that simple.
It’s a fairly well-trodden storyline and yet it felt fresh in this book. It took a little getting into for me personally but once Jess, Michael, and Jess and Joe’s old friend, Belinda, decide to go on a trip to track down Joe by following the postmarks on his letters and postcards, well that’s when it really took off for me and I loved the whole mystery and the gathering of evidence in Manchester, Dublin, Wexford, Cornwall, London and then….well that would be telling.
I realise that this makes it sound like a fluffy bit of fun and actually it’s far from that. It’s incredibly sad and moving and the background story, which only unfolds as the book progresses, is utterly heartbreaking.
Maybe One Day is a sweet story, funny and light-hearted at times, but with this spectre at the feast always loitering there, for Jess at least. I was rooting for her and hoping that she would find Joe and be happy. Whether she does or not is something you will have to find out for yourself. It’s a reminder that there’s often more than one side to any story and sometimes you need to find out what the other side is to be able to move on.
Debbie Johnson is an award-winning author who lives and works in Liverpool, where she divides her time between writing, caring for a small tribe of children and animals, and not doing the housework.
She writes feel-good emotional women’s fiction, and has sold more than 1,000,000 books worldwide. She is published globally in nine different languages, and has had two books optioned for film and TV.
Her books include the best-selling Comfort Food Cafe series,The A-Z of Everything, and the upcoming Maybe One Day.
She is also the author of supernatural crime thriller, Fear No Evil, and urban fantasies Dark Vision and Dark Touch.
