Just One Day: A Review

An Extremely Angry Review of Just One Day by Gayle Forman

RATING: ☆☆☆☆☆
SUMMARY: When sheltered American good girl Allyson "LuLu" Healey first meets laid-back Dutch actor Willem De Ruiter at an underground performance of Twelfth Night in England, there’s an undeniable spark. After just one day together, that spark bursts into a flame, or so it seems to Allyson, until the following morning, when she wakes up after a whirlwind day in Paris to discover that Willem has left. Over the next year, Allyson embarks on a journey to come to terms with the narrow confines of her life, and through Shakespeare, travel, and a quest for her almost-true-love, to break free of those confines. (courtesy of goodreads)


One of these days, I’m going to invent a time travel machine so I can go back and stop myself from ever picking this book off the library shelf. I am in a very small minority here, but let me just say: I. Hated. This. Book. So. Much. The best part of reading this was the Taylor Swift I listened to during it, and it was a struggle to read all 369 pages of absolute nonsense. In good conscience, I cannot even give this book one star due to the blatant slut shaming/girl hate, instalove, horrible writing, and a very homophobic bit. Yeah, so this book sucked. Why did I finish it? I couldn’t review it fairly if I didn’t finish the whole book. However, I would not recommend the book under any circumstances, and everything after this point is going to be a pretty angry and spiteful deconstruction of everything I hated about this book. There shall be spoilers.

In order to get a good grasp on my hatred for this book and my inability to find even one good thing about it, let’s read the notes I took while reading! This is the first time I have taken notes about a book, and it was because I would rather write them than focus on the disaster of a story.

• Protagonist COMPLAINS about seeing fabulous European cities. (Also, there is no freaking McDonalds near the Spanish Steps and the ruins don’t smell like cat pee.)
• All. The. Girl. Hate. Even towards a girl she knew for five minutes! The most positive thing said about a woman in the first 100 pages was the waitress brought us our food.
• Idiotic stain/love metaphor.
• Dual personality Allyson/Lulu? I wanted to smack the character - YOU’RE THE SAME DAMN PERSON MASQUERADING UNDER A DIFFERENT NAME.
• Horrible writing. Ex. His smile unfurled like a sail. I could not figure out whether this meant his smile faded away or appeared. Turned out to be the latter. Go figure.
• So much instalove.
• Protagonist complains about vacation so much I may strangle her.
• She is literally flattered by being called an accident! In what world?
• Allyson is so freaking snobby. 
• She complains about the Louvre now? COME ON.
• I can’t convince my friends to give me $2 I sure as hell couldn’t convince a stranger to take me to Paris. I mean, I know it’s fiction, but… what?
• Allyson is not Willem’s girlfriend, what he does with other girls is none of her business and somehow she makes it her business. 
• Even the names are pretentious! Allyson and Willem instead of Allison/Alison and William. I mean… I can sort of understand Willem (it’s Dutch, Willem’s ethnicity in the book) but Allyson?
• The accident motif isn’t working. (And, dear 150-pages-in-Minna, it will never work. Right after Willem leaves, when the motif would start working, it is never brought up again.)
• She complains about her goddamn golden watch. What. The. Hell.
• Italicizing a word in every sentence this character (Kali) says doesn’t give her a unique voice. It makes her painful to read. Also, it’s obvious she’s not well developed.
• Allyson freaks out when her friend says she’s going out with girls. She basically says she should have realized because of her friend’s “hairy armpits, nose ring, and new haircut.” That is so incredibly stereotypical and wrong I’m done. Homophobia.
• Allyson also describes the way a friend talks as “sassy gay sidekick!” Stereotypical and rude. This is at the top of page 208, the moment I realized I wanted to rip every page in this book into 40000 pieces. 
• No one becomes that decent at French in two months. We never see Allyson practice or anything, and it’s very unrealistic. Yes! It’s fiction! But it’s set in the real world.
• She expects a city barely mentioned in her guidebook to be tiny (which I understand,) ugly (which I don’t), or industrial (which I still don’t understand.)
• Allyson Healey spends one whole year of her life looking for a guy she spent one day with. She spends so much money and so much time… for what? The only reasonable explanation is that she wants her watch back, but that doesn’t end up mattering. I cannot believe the level of idiocy here. YOU CANNOT FALL IN LOVE WITH SOMEONE AFTER ONE DAMN DAY. LOVE TAKES TIME. 

Therein ends my angry rambling notes taken during Just One Day! God, this was so annoying. I need to figure out where I’m going with this review. Just writing it is making me angry. I don’t think I have ever hated a book like this. Wouldn’t recommend, don’t subject yourself to this ever. Anyway, I’m gonna go eat some cake and wonder what happened to Gayle Forman after she wrote Where She Went.