For One More Day

If for one more day, you are able to spend with a loved one who has actually passed away, that would then be a day of rich emotional returns, forgiveness and redemption. If for one more day...that's the problem you see, we always thought we have one more day.

Mitch Albom's latest novel is hugely, a remnant of The Five People You Meet in Heaven. It falls comfortably into a chasm before greatness - no, no Nobel Prize material here. But it does not really matter I guess. What is great about Mitch Albom is that he seems to have the knack of writing something that people from a wide range of age would enjoy - from teenager to working adult. That alone more than made up for the lack of depth, the cliché-like lessons and the sob-sob, almost over-melancholy, old-fashion storyline. And this time, for some reason, the lessons, which touched me in his previous novels, are less vivid and poignant. I have a feeling that the novelist had not pushed or drilled himself enough, but for one moment, I thought he almost break through. That was when the protagonist, his ghostly mother and his father's second wife appeared on a mirror, just like a weird family portrait. Well, almost.