Just One Year

Starred review from August 19, 2013
Those who have read Forman’s Just One Day (published earlier this year) already know what happened to Allyson, the foreign exchange student whose whirlwind romance with a Dutch actor, Willem, was cut short. In this companion novel, Forman shares Willem’s captivating side of the story as he embarks on a global quest to find his lost love. Besides discovering how and why Willem left Allyson stranded in Paris, readers will learn what makes him tick, as Willem’s passions and troubled history come to light. Although Willem has plenty of money, there are things he can’t buy, like affection from his emotionally distant mother or a sense of rootedness he hasn’t felt since his father’s death. It also can’t buy the commitment Willem will need to become a serious actor. Old acquaintances and new friends guide Willem on a path spanning three continents, helping him realize the possibilities that lie before him. The complexity of Willem’s character, the twisting plot, and far-flung settings (including the Netherlands, Mexico, and India) create an alluring story that pushes beyond the realm of star-crossed romance. Ages 14–up. Agent: Sarah Burnes, the Gernert Company.

October 1, 2013
Willem de Ruiter, a rootless young man, reconnects with his family and himself as he searches for the 18-year-old girl he deserted after a romantic night in Paris in this companion to Just One Day (2013). In the previous book, heroine Allyson finds her true self as she searches for Willem; here, Forman tells Willem's side of the story, chronicling his psychological growth during the year after their magical time together. For this slow-to-start story to work, readers must believe that Willem's night with Allyson had a profound emotional effect on him and that his feelings for her will be lasting, a hard sell considering his past. Additionally, his character will test readers' patience, as he wends and whines his way through the first half of the novel. However, the story picks up steam when Willem travels to India to see his emotionally remote mother and gets, if not precisely an aha moment, at least a new and more accurate understanding of her, an important step in his own emotional healing. He comes to realize that his avocation is acting and that commitment to the art itself is something worth fighting for. As he becomes engaged personally and professionally, readers will find their interest quickening, right up to the satisfying denouement. Billed as a romance but really a journey of self-exploration, this story initially confounds before paying off. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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November 1, 2013

Gr 9 Up-This companion novel to Just One Day (Dutton, 2013) explores the other side of the ill-timed romance between an American high school graduate and a Dutch actor. In that book, good-girl Allyson sheds her identity and inhibitions to spend one romantic day in Paris with Willem, a traveling actor-and spends the next year hunting him down after he abandons her. Forman has finally answered frustrated readers' questions about why Willem left Allyson alone in an artists' squat and disappeared. This novel, written from his point of view, picks up from the moment when he wakes up in a Paris hospital after a severe beating to the moment Allyson walks in his door a year later. Forman mirrors the structure of the first book and uses the year of separation as a time of growth for Willem. He uses the aborted romance as a catalyst for reconnecting with family, close friends, and his love of the theater. Readers are asked to suspend disbelief quite a few times (Willem's temporary amnesia after his injury seems quite selective), but besotted readers will be more than willing to do so if it brings the lovers together again. The number of characters and backstories makes the story a little cluttered, but the writing is lively and the romantic narrative is compelling. Just One Year can be read as a stand-alone novel, but those readers would not catch the breadcrumbs Forman dropped in Just One Day. As much a travelogue as it is a romance, this novel will appeal to fans of the movie Before Sunrise or Maureen Johnson's 13 Little Blue Envelopes (HarperCollins, 2005).-Susannah Goldstein, Convent of the Sacred Heart, New York City

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2013
Grades 9-12 In Just One Day (2013), readers followed Allyson as she struggled to understand what happened to Willem after one magical day and night in Parisbefore he seemingly up and left. Now it's Willem's turn to relive that day, and search for the girl he called Lulu. Beginning where the previous novel left off, Willem is aimless, restless, and curious about the intersection where love meets luck, where fate meets will. With few details about Lulu to go on, he spends a year following dead-end trails, from Mexico to India, seeking the girl with the dark hair that he met one day by accident. This isn't so much about the romance between Willem and Lulualthough the essence of it permeates every pageas it is about how Willem's search leads him to find anchors in his own life. Travel is revelatory for Willem, as is Shakespearean acting and mulling over big universe questions like chance versus choice; at each stop, Forman gracefully peels back mysterious Willem's layers. As satisfying as both of these books are, readers are going to wish for a third.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)