The premise of The One That I Want: A Novel is promising: Tilly Everett, married to her high school sweetheart and trying to get pregnant, is seemingly happy with her life as a guidance counselor in her hometown. But when she runs into a former classmate who is now a psychic, she receives the “gift of clarity.” Tilly begins seeing visions – her alcoholic father falling off the wagon, for example – that begin coming true.
The problem is not the big leap of faith required to believe that Tilly can see the future. It’s that she’s a hard character to latch onto, both for her relentless optimism and her refusal to acknowledge that her loved one's problems are rarely in black and white. That said, characters such as her sister, Darcy, are almost irredeemable in their immaturity and selfishness, while Tilly seems to have some bias against her other sister for no discerible reason.
As Tilly gets in touch with her anger, she becomes more likable, but the plot twists veer from the predictable to the telenovela-esque. And perhaps I have an innate problem with Scotch’s overall theme, which is that everyone gets to be happy if they are only strong enough. “Dreams float out there to be captured, but only if you’re brave enough to reach out and grasp them,” Tilly muses at one point, a sentence that made me wince almost as much as “happiness is what you choose.” Eeek.
I really liked Time of My Life: A Novel and recommend it to people, so I am looking forward to reading Scotch’s further work and chalking this up to a less-than-successful experiment.
