One Moment - Review

One Moment

By: Kristina McBride

Expected publication: June 26th 2012 by EgmontUSA

272 Pages

Source: Publisher via NetGalley

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Mystery

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Goodreads description—This was supposed to be the best summer of Maggie’s life. Now it’s the one she’d do anything to forget.

Maggie Reynolds remembers hanging out at the gorge with her closest friends after a blowout party the night before. She remembers climbing the trail hand in hand with her perfect boyfriend, Joey. She remembers that last kiss, soft, lingering, and meant to reassure her. So why can’t she remember what happened in the moment before they were supposed to dive? Why was she left cowering at the top of the cliff, while Joey floated in the water below—dead?

As Maggie’s memories return in snatches, nothing seems to make sense. Why was Joey acting so strangely at the party? Where did he go after taking her home? And if Joey was keeping these secrets, what else was he hiding?

The latest novel from the author of The Tension of Opposites, One Moment is a mysterious, searing look at how an instant can change everything you believe about the world around you.

This book is exactly what it sounds like. I read it quickly and kept finding myself wanting to come back to it when I had to put it down. Even though the plot was completely predictable, I still found myself wrapped up in the story of Maggie and Joey and their friends.

I know Maggie’s temporary memory loss falls into the category of “possible,” but I still struggled with the idea of her losing her memory. It almost seems as if it wasn’t Joey’s death that even caused the memory loss, which I find to be a bit of a stretch. I read Notes to Self by Avery Sawyer (my review), where an actual brain injury as a result of a terrible fall causes Robin’s memory loss, and that’s obviously a lot more plausible than just a traumatic emotional experience.

The characters experienced a lot of emotion, but as the reader I was able to keep myself outside of those emotions. And I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. In most cases I want to feel what the characters feel and experience those emotions as if they were happening to myself, and I didn’t in this case. But I’m not sure for this book that this can be considered a negative thing. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood to cry, so I didn’t allow myself to get sucked into the emotion. But honestly, I never even felt slightly like crying.

Even though Maggie finds out that Joey had his secrets, and those secrets crushed her, she learned that life isn’t always black and white. I liked the analogy her counselor, Dr. Guest, gives her about the quilt. As a whole you love the quilt and there might be pieces that are used that you wouldn’t have picked for yourself if you had to choose, but those pieces are part of a whole. And people are like this too. Not 100% good and not 100% beautiful. We’re flawed. To draw from Candor’s manifesto (Divergent) and Veronica Roth, “We know that while we are flawed in a unique way, we are not unique because we are flawed. Therefore we can be authentic.”(my review of Divergent)

Anyway, not too much else to be said about One Moment without giving away more of the obvious. It was a fast read that I enjoyed and kept coming back to for more. 3 Stars, check it out and let me know what you think.

Updated: July 7, 2018