'And in that instant, he knows in his heart that today is a momentous day; come what may, he and Alice will meet again, and life will never be the same.' Alice is stuck in an internship she loathes and a body she is forever trying to change.
Ben, also in his early twenties, is still trying to find his place in the world.
By chance they meet one day in a London park.
Day 1
Ben spots Alice sitting on a bench and feels compelled to speak to her. To his surprise, their connection is instant. But before numbers are exchanged, Alice is whisked off by her demanding boss.
20 minutes later
Alone in her office toilets, Alice looks at herself in the mirror and desperately searches for the beauty Ben could see in her.
Meanwhile, having misunderstood a parting remark, Ben is already planning a trip to Glasgow where he believes Alice lives, not realising that they actually live barely ten miles apart.
Over the next 31 days, Alice and Ben will discover that even if they never manage to find each other again, they have sparked a change in each other that will last a lifetime. In 31 Days of Wonder, Tom Winter shows us the magic of chance encounters and how one brief moment on a Thursday afternoon can change the rest of your life.
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[It began like all Ben's conversations. Badly.]***
(Corsair Books, 10 August 2017, copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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31 Days of Wonder is a delightful book, and not what I expected at all.
Judging from the blurb, I was expecting this to be a modern love story; two people meet, fall in love, spend 31 days searching the city for each other, meet again by chance, live happy ever after and have 2.4 children.
That's not what happened at all. If this had been the case the book would have been a cliché. The author decided to take the story in an unexpected direction. Sheer genius! I love it when unexpected things happen in a book.
I fell in love with 31 Days of Wonder, with Alice and Ben. I loved how fragile and vulnerable Ben seemed to be at first and how he went from strength to strength over the course of the book. I loved Alice, how she goes from being the fat girl everyone puts down to being the strong woman who stares life square in the face.
