For One More Day Book Review

FOR ONE MORE DAY BOOK SYNOPSIS

Poignantly sad, a young boy, Chick, struggles with divorce or his parents. His desire for the love of an absent father is intermixed with all the anger that goes along with that wish. It brings him to a point in his life that he can no longer live with himself and he attempts suicide - twice!

He gets the chance to spend one more day with his dead mother and experience a flood of memories. The times his mother stuck up for him and the times he didn't stick up for his mother. He ends up feeling ashamed of himself for not being there when his mother died and feeling regret for not taking the time while she was alive to appreciate her sacrifices for him. He experiences eye opening facts.

Chick gets a second chance and what he does with that brings him back to life. Masterfully written, this book goes back and forth between his thoughts and the "ordinary" day with his mother for which he has so yearned.

QUEENIE B SAYS

As the father in the book says, "you can be a mammas boy, or you be a daddies boy, but you can't be both."

This affects Chick his entire life as he quests to please the dad who left him as a young boy, all the while being raised by an unselfish, loving mother whom he doesn't appreciate. Chick holds onto the adolescent anger that children of divorce tend to do. Decades later when his mother dies, he wants to take his own life.

He knows he hasn't spent the time he should have with her -" too busy, too tired, don't feel like dealing with it, you count the hours you could have spent with your mother. It's a lifetime." Luckily for him, he fails at his suicide attempts and gets to do something we all would love. He has another day with his mother.

The truisms in this book are cataclysmic for Chick. By forgiving himself through the eyes of his mother, who had a "bottomless well of love for him," he is then able to move past his tortured life.

A sweet and tender read, this book is for anyone in a family.

FOR ONE MORE DAY DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Was Chick a Mammas boy or a Daddies boy?
2. Was Chick's behavior as a young boy of the 1960s over the divorce of his parents a normal reaction?
3. Did Chick pass his parents attitudes through to his own child?