The Day We Meet Again book review [ARC]

I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The Day We Meet Again by Miranda Dickinson
Pages: 384
Source: Netgalley
Goodreads

The brand-new novel from The Sunday Times bestselling author, Miranda Dickinson.

‘We’ll meet again at St Pancras station, a year from today. If we’re meant to be together, we’ll both be there. If we’re not, it was never meant to be . . .’

Phoebe and Sam meet by chance at St Pancras station. Heading in opposite directions, both seeking their own adventures, meeting the love of their lives wasn’t part of the plan. So they make a promise: to meet again in the same place in twelve months' time if they still want to be together.

But is life ever as simple as that?

This is a story of what-ifs and maybes – and how one decision can change your life forever…

I am so upset to say that this book just wasn’t for me. I wanted so badly to love The Day We Meet Again, it had on face value everything I want from a book, a romance that can’t be and a climatic ending, but the payoff was very far from that. I have to be honest and say that the two main characters ruined this book for me, they were flat and the back and forth between them didn’t seem all that real or realistic at all. I think I was expecting something more and what I got instead was a lot of drama over nothing. I thought the ending was a cop out and I definitely think there are better books out there.

As I have mentioned the biggest problem I had with The Day We Meet Again was the fact that the characters came across as extremely flat. I have no issue with having a romance book based purely off two people if those two people are interesting enough to hold the story on their own. Phoebe and Sam were not those people, the conversations they had were mundane, their reasons for drama were inflated and completely boring and their entire relationship had no foundations. I also thought that there wasn’t enough development done on the side characters, and I still don’t know what happened in their story lines that were started but never finished.

This was a really hard section for me to write because I think all the bits that should have been my best bits of The Day We Meet Again, were tainted by the bad characters and lack of development. I think my favourite bits if I took the characters out of the equation would have to be the way that the landscapes in the different places that Phoebe finds herself. I loved learning about where she had found herself, I just wish that had been more of the focus that her emails and texts with Sam.

I have mentioned how much I really didn’t enjoy the characters in The Day We Meet Again and they definitely make up one of my worst bits about the story. However another reason I wasn’t a fan of this book was just how underedeveloped everything was, even the relationship in which the whole book was based, there was literally nothing to keep them together and yet we had to listen and read awful heart hearted emails and text messages between them. I wanted to throw my Kindle at the wall. I can’t even bring myself to talk about the ending, I so wanted this to be the redeeming factor but it was rubbish, there was no actual closure on anything that had happened, and I just feel like it was rushed with no real effort to make these characters anything more than two dimensional.

I don’t think I would recommend The Day We Meet Again, there are definitely better romance books our there with characters that I would actually care about if something happened to them. I just think there was too much going on in this book for there to be any real development.

Have you ever read a book where you just didn’t connect with the characters? Let me know in the comments