For One More Day by Mitch Albom

I'm not a big fan of audiobooks and only under rare circumstances will listen to one. Last Thanksgiving was one of those occasions, when my wife and I were driving back to Buffalo from a holiday getaway in Montréal and had a long stretch that was perfect for an audiobook.

For One More Day is in the tradition of It's a Wonderful Life and tells of Charles "Chick" Benetto, a man who was once a baseball star with a loving family, but who has since fallen far, and is now out of baseball and estranged from his family. When the text begins, Chick has hit rock bottom and is contemplating suicide. As with George Bailey, though, before Chick completes the act, he encounters the supernatural in the ghost of his dead mother.

This is the setup for the rest of the novel as Chick gets to spend "one more day" with his mother and recall crucial events from his past. Along the way, he'll ask and tell his mother all the things he wanted to express but didn't before she died.

Your mileage may vary, but I thought For One More Day was pretty heavy-handed and overdone, not to mention derivative. That deeper layer of substance the book needed to rise above the surface and choreographed emotional set pieces just wasn't there, and it felt too staged and "made up" as a result.

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