For One Day More by Mitch Albom

The novel that I'm going to review for this month's book review is For One More Day by Mitch Albom. This is a touching story about the family we love and the chances we miss. It is the story of a mother and a son, and a relationship that covers a lifetime and beyond. It explores the question, “What would you do if you could spend one more day with the ones you love?”  The story covers a conversation Charley Benetto has with a sports writer. Throughout the conversation he goes back and forth between the one last day he had with his mother and the important events in his life, sharing his feelings– both past and present– about them. 

As a young boy Charley Benetto makes the choice to be a daddy’s boy and does everything his father asks him to.  Then his father disappears, leaving a broken family and an embarrassing situation for the young Charley to endure.  Being raised by a single mother has it’s challenges and plenty of embarrassment, many that Charley takes out on his mother.

So he chooses his father, and he worships him- right up to the day the man disappears.  An eleven-year-old Charley must then turn to his mother, who bravely raises him on her own, despite Charley’s emabarrassment and yearning for a complete family.

The interesting part of this story begans when Charley becomes a broken man.  His life has been crumbled by alcohol and regret.  He loses his job. He leaves his family. He hits bottom after discovering his only daughter has shut him out of her wedding.  And he decides to take his own life.

The most interesting part of this story is when he makes a midnight ride to his small home-town, with plans to do himself in.  But upon failing to do that, he staggers back to his old house, only to make an astonishing discovery. His mother- who died eight years earlier- is still living there, and welcomes him home as if nothing had ever happened.

What follows is the one ‘ordinary’ day so many of us yearn for, a chance to make good with a lost parent, to explain family secrets, and to seek forgiveness.  Somewhere between this life and the next, Charley learns the things he never knew about his mother and her sacrifices.  And he tries, with her tender guidance, to put the crumbled pieces of his life back together.

Shairashree

4 Cergas

28th March 2014