Book #67: One Plus One by Jojo Moyes

I read Jojo Moyes' Me Before You a while ago and really liked it. Moyes' style is super readable and I loved the characters she created in that book. I've seen a number of people talking about this book on different blogs and I've been meaning to get around to it for a while now, because I knew I would enjoy it. And Moyes does a great job, once again, at creating these very believable and likable characters who have real-life struggles and feelings. And in this book they get caught up in this awesome adventure that changes their lives forever.

Jess Thomas has a pretty hard life--she's a single mom raising two kids and working crazy hard at two jobs to make ends meet. Her husband ran out on them and says he can't pay any child support, her stepson is getting beat up every day and her daughter is a math geek who's likely to be heading the same way, since their small town isn't very friendly to people who are different. But her daughter gets offered this amazing scholarship to a private school, and is given the chance to participate in the Math Olympiad in Scotland, so she tries to head up there with her kids on the spur of the moment. They get pulled over after not very long, and suddenly get rescued by Ed, a rich, selfish software tycoon who is surprised by his own desire to help. The rest of the book details their adventure with getting there and how the trip changes all of them (and of course, there's some inevitable romance thrown in there, and as unlikely as the two main characters seem to be paired together at the beginning, I like them a lot together).

Just like in Me Before You, I loved how Jess is not your stereotypical romantic comedy heroine. She's not some high-powered professional working in London, who's kind of strapped for cash but goes out on weekends to bars anyways and meets guys there. She works as a cleaner and at a bar at night in order to make ends meet; she is literally just dollars away from being broke all the time. And she has two older children. But she is still a fun, real person underneath all those challenges. And I liked the juxtaposition of the class relations that Ed and Jess find as they start getting to know each other, and the (very) different money troubles they're both in. But I really loved how Tanzie and Nicky, Jess's kids, really got their own voices (they each serve as narrators occasionally) and weren't just throwaway parts of the story to the romance--their concerns and needs were central to the whole story and to Jess's whole life. I will definitely look at more of Moyes' books in the future.