One Moment by Kristina McBride Review

Summer is supposed to be when teenagers have the time of their lives. They discover themselves, have relationships, party, and make lasting memories with their best friends.  For Maggie, her summers will never be the same again.  It took one moment, one second, and forever her life was changed.

After witnessing her boyfriend’s accidental death, Maggie immediately suffers from amnesia of what happened because of the shock.  Maggie and her boyfriend Joey were about to go cliff diving together, Joey jumped, Maggie didn’t, and Joey fell to his death.  All of their friends were at the bottom of the cliff and they want to know what went wrong. After all Joey has cliff jumped a million times before. The one time he takes Maggie to jump with him, he dies?

Joey’s death becomes an investigation because of it’s suspicious nature. Maggie’s best friend Adam is by her side, holding her hand through it all. But Adam was Joey’s best friend and he is suffering as well.  When he starts to withdraw from Maggie and becomes distant, she starts to feel like she is all alone.  It doesn’t help that whenever Adam is around, she gets flashes of memories coming back to her that don’t make any sense. How will she make sense of her life and what happened without Adam by her side?

ONE MOMENT is a young adult story that explores the topic of grief in a heartbreaking and real manner.  I could relate to every emotion Maggie went through after Joey’s death.  From having the image of him dead glued in her brain and wanting to rip her eyelids out because it hurt too much, to wishing she did something different to change the course of what happened.  Going to a funeral and having that out of body experience where you can’t believe this is happening, all of it, was real and something everyone has had to deal with one time in their life.

I felt Maggie’s grief deeply and I felt for her and every emotion she experienced dealing with her tremendous loss.  ONE MOMENT has a mystery element to it because the reader is given a clue as to what happened to Joey, but not the whole story. As we read we truly don’t know if Maggie as the narrator is dependable and truthful, afterall she is suffering from amnesia.  So at one point I started to question if what she was narrating was even reality.

ONE MOMENT is the best Young Adult book that I have read in a very long time.  It is so good that I can’t manage to even read any other books right now because all I can think about is Maggie and Joey.  When an author’s characters come alive like Kristina McBride’s have done for me, that is a big deal.  That is DAMN GOOD writing at it’s finest.

Read ONE MOMENT.  You won’t regret it.

MY RATING