Stella Sweeney has an ordinary life, married to bathroom designer Ryan and she has two teenage children. One day, she wakes up with a tingling sensation in her fingers. By the next day she is completely paralysed, and spends eleven months in hospital battling Guillain-Barré syndrome. Her whole life is turned upside down by Mannix Taylor, her neurologist, who devises a way for her to communicate by blinking, and subsequently assembles what she says into a book called One Blink at a Time. Fully recovered, Stella soon finds herself with a book deal, and she moves to America to promote herself. But things don’t work out quite as well as she wanted, and a year later she finds herself back in Dublin struggling to put her life back together.
I’m a huge Marian Keyes fan, I’ve read every one of her books, and this was not her best. Firstly, the timeline of the story focuses on three stages of Stella’s life, the present, her time in hospital and her time in America. Her time in the hospital is easily the best, it seemed very well researched and well written. Her time in America was very dragged out, and her present day story was quite dull. It jumped seemingly randomly from one time frame to another. I felt that the layout of the book could have been better.
Stella herself I found difficult to like at first. During her time in hospital I definitely warmed to her, she was strong, capable and very brave. Then when it skipped to the other time frames, she was weak willed, a doormat for all around her, so overall I wasn’t sure who she really was. Mannix was lovely, a generous and loving guy throughout. Ryan the ex I hated, he was such a whiney childish idiot, as was Jeffery their son. I love Betsy, she was a hippy chick with great potential as a character, but she only briefly flitted in and out of the story.
While Keyes’ novels are usually quite funny, I didn’t see the humour in this one, it fell flat. There were good moments, like Stella’s very Irish dad reading a raunchy novel at her bedside, but there just wasn’t enough to make it a good read. It felt dragged out and I was very disappointed.
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