Miss You.

 Tess and Gus first meet briefly in Florence in 1997. They are from vastly different backgrounds, she is inter-railing around Europe with her best friend, he is holidaying with his parents. Over the course of the next sixteen years their paths cross many times (they will both be in a queue in a shop or on the same flight for instance) but they never meet face to face until very near the end of the story.

Told from the alternating viewpoints of Tess and Gus over the next sixteen years Miss You recounts what has happened to both of them since they first encountered each other. 

Miss You has had a lot of publicity in England and many comparisons have been made between this and David Nichol's One Day, which I loved, so this was an obvious book for me to read. I can see why it has been compared to One Day but it is very different as the central characters don't know each other and only pass each other by without realising.

The concept of the book is good and the story is so easy to follow that I found myself speeding through the 400+ pages of this but I didn't much like Gus and Tess. In fact, I found them both to be awfully dull and they both seemed to be so old - even when they were teenagers!

Overall, Miss You simply didn't gel with me. The choices that Gus and Tess made in their lives, their friends, and their relationships didn't seem to fit in with their perceived characters, and as I didn't care for either of them I sadly didn't care what became of their romance.

I didn't hate Miss You, the premise was interesting and it wasn't badly written, my gripes were with the characters and their unrealistic circumstances. If you want a super easy beach read that doesn't require much attention when reading then this may be for you but it doesn't live up to One Day as far as I am concerned.