Day One by Abigail Dean

First published February 20, 2024

Available in normal book form, digital or Audible. I listened to this book through Audible where it’s Narrated by Emma Atkins, Sarah Durham & Nigel Pilkington

It’s going to be hard to comment about this book without spoilers, but I will try my best.

What I Liked:

I liked that in the Audio version, it contained three narrators instead of one. Before realizing this, the different voice at the start of the next chapter initially distracted me. I tend to multi-task and was momentarily thrown by the change in voice.

However, I’ve found that by switching the voices, it added to the narrative, it added a certain depth to the story and a lot of believability, to the point that I was Googling to see if the incident in the book actually happened.

For the record, it didn’t, just to save you searching, this is pure fiction, but I do wonder what inspired Abigail to write this story.

The believability isn’t just in the narrative itself, but in the actual characters IN the story. We WANT to believe them, and this includes the main character. We WANT to know that what they’re saying is what actually happened, and when we learn that a lie WAS told, you can’t help but forgive the person for telling it.

(I can reveal this bit about the lie as it’s mentioned on the book cover.)

If anything, the lie was thrust upon them, and if they did anything wrong, it was not correcting it, but just going with the flow which, I think, in a situation like the one in this book, the catalyst that started it all, it could be easy for anyone to do.

After all, a lie can be simply what someone believes to be true.

The Flashbacks. I tend to favour this style of writing as it feeds little bits of information into the storyline as it goes along. You hear a fresh character, and you wonder where they were at the time of the Catalyst and what they were doing and the flashbacks help a lot with this.

The POV of each character is vital to this story. If this were a movie, I can see this as one of those movies where the stories are splintered but all come together by the end. Abigail did a great job in letting us see inside the heads of each of these main characters.

You get a feel for each and every character, and it’s hard to find a real villain in this piece even when you believe to be one or even more than one. In some ways, mental health comes into play. In other ways, it’s people wanting to be a hero, or, in another case, the word “hero” is thrust upon them, unwelcome, uninvited. But when one is put in the spotlight, what can one do?

Thanks to the narrators, we are reminded that this is a town somewhere in England, and hearing the different dialects of the various characters helped to draw a background of the type of people in this small town.

What I didn’t Like:

As much as I loved the flashbacks, the timeline, which headed each chapter I found a little confusing as the timeline seemed to stretch months, but to me, it felt closer to years (and in fact, from the 2nd year onwards, the timeline DOES jump in years which greatly ironed out some of the confusion), but it’s the precipitating months, which headed most of the chapters, that I found to be a bit of a struggle to follow.

In Summary:

All in all, it’s a book I’d definitely listen to again now that I’ve heard the full story. I’m curious to see, if this ever became a movie, how it would be played out. Would it be as good as the book (which admittedly, rarely is), or would this become a masterpiece.

The book, as a whole, is beautifully written. Abigail shows more than tells despite the fact that she’s using a timeline, but we see the angst in the characters as well as the shock of what happened and how it affected people in the ways that something like this would affect others. We are reminded that everyone is different. What may turn some into sullen, angry people cause others to turn inward with grief, depression and a feeling of just existing and not really living.

Lives continue, beyond the moment, and we are reminded of that too and that things don’t always come out the way we plan.

This book is NOT a time waster. You won’t feel like you’ve wasted valuable moments in your life by taking the time out to read (or listen) to this book. If anything, it’s a key reminder of what humanity is about. The bad as well as the good. There are no fairy tale endings.

What I liked most about this book, and I’m placing it here in the summary instead of what I liked is that this book has closure. There’s no grief at the end of the book that readers often find with other books. There’s only peace that we now know the ending. This book doesn’t need a sequel. I’m not sure what the author could possibly add to this story that hasn’t already been covered. And that’s saying a lot considering not every book feels as complete as this one.

5 out of 5 stars.