BLOG TOUR: REVIEW, EXCERPT & GIVEAWAY {INT}- THIS IS ONE MOMENT by Mila Gray

Posted September 12, 2015 by Emma in Blog / 13 Comments

Happy Sunday Everyone! Today I’m the last part of the This Is One Moment blog tour, the sequel to Come Back to Me. I couldn’t wait to read this novel and I loved it even more than the first. After meeting Sarah/Mila, I am one to find myself always reading her novels and I can’t wait to read more. Before I review it, here is a little more about the novel… AND don’t forget to enter a INTERNATIONAL giveaway, you lucky people!

This Is One Moment (Come Back To Me #2)
by Mila Gray
Publisher – Pan Macmillan
Release Date – September 10th 2015
Buy – Amazon | Book Depository

A forbidden romance. A wounded Marine who thinks he’s beyond saving. A girl who’s determined to prove him wrong.

Didi Monroe’s waited her whole life for the type of romance you see in the movies, so when Hollywood heartthrob Zac Ridgemont sweeps her off her feet, Didi believes she might finally have met the one.

While Zac’s away filming for the summer, Didi begins her internship at a military hospital in California. There, she meets wounded Marine Noel Walker. Frustrated on the outside and broken on the inside, Walker’s a pain-in-the-ass patient who refuses all help. Yet Didi can’t help but be drawn to him, and though he’s strictly out of bounds it soon becomes impossible to ignore the sparks flying between them.

As the attraction simmers into dangerous territory, Didi finds herself falling hard for a man she knows is going to break her heart. Because Walker doesn’t believe in love or happy ever afters. So what possible future can there be? Then tragedy hits, shattering both their worlds, and Didi is forced to choose between fighting for love or merely falling for the illusion of it

Mila Gray has done it again. Since reading CBTM last year, I was so excited to read another book under this pen name, it was one of my most anticipated reads. Sarah Alderson has an extraordinary way of writing and creating a NA novel, especially one focusing on the soldiers in all shapes and forms. This is my favourite out of the both for me.

Didi starts her summer internship at her father’s rehabilitation clinic. She’s there to care for the patients and practice towards he thesis until the summer term. But the thing to remember is that she should keep everything professional doctor-patient relationship… But sometimes rules are worth breaking when she sees Walker. Walker is a Lieutenant, he came back after his whole group was targeted, him and Sanchez were the only survivors and he has the weight of guilt and fault on his shoulders. He has nothing to feel, to smile or to even get up in the morning for let alone shave until Didi comes along. The moment that he split yogurt on her first, spun their relationship into action.

What I loved was that Mila still kept her dual perspective and with someone who is Blind, it certainly opens your own eyes to what it’s like or even process. To be honest I think no matter how much one person writes about this subject, no one can really know what it’s like. Personally Walker to me, he seems like superhero, he’s ripped as Didi describes, beautiful eyes and hard abs. He has a kind yet rough face, one minute he’s his age the next he could look so much older from the experience he’s undertaken. But what i felt towards him was courage, braveness and inspiring. I didn’t feel pity and I would hate too, I didn’t feel sorry either, because he’s sick and tired of that. What I did was that I understood him which I felt was the main thing out of his character. Well that and thinking he’s hot, and fanning ones self. I also loved him more when he said his favourite film was The Shawshank Redemption. He’s already my hero.

Didi is a romantic, she want to be a lobster to someone else, she wants to find her soulmate. It doesn’t help the fact that her mums a sex therapist and her dad is a psychologist. When she meets actor Zac, she thinks she has it all. But it didn’t turn out to be like that, she didn’t want to be someone one night stand. She wants a commitment at the end of it. A promise.

“It’s the person you always want to come back to. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I don’t think home is a place. I think it’s a person. And when you find home, the place you feel the safest, the place you go to for shelter and where you can be fully yourself, the. You know you’re in love, really in love, not just infatuated or head over heals in lust.” – Didi.

That is what I think true love to be and I found myself so emotional over this as this is how I know it to be and it felt so real they way Didi/Mila described that I felt completely at one with her character. Home is where the heart that is what they say and I believe that. You know you found a novel, that describes your deepest thought and feelings. Walker was that person, what she saw was the person underneath as well as on the outside. She knew she couldn’t have him, but they weren’t going to stop at friends.

Didi and Walker are nothing like you will ever witness in a novel, they are true, they are raw and they will put other fiction couples to shames. They are truly beautiful in their own way. You know when you read about a couple like this that you are connected to them, by the goosebumps, the butterflies in your stomach the constant smile why your reading. And the fact that your family keep on interrupting you in the good bits knowing that it irritates you. *wink wink* Between Didi and Walker there are no barriers, regardless that Walker is blind, she doesn’t see that, she sees past that, she wants to help him but let him also stand on his own two feet. When Didi comes Walker knows where she is, he’s attuned to up her presence by her walk, her perfume, her voice. It’s like they are lobsters, (Didi reference) they are made for each other.

Like I said before Mila has a way with words, a rawness, truth and honesty to them that I find so inspiring and accelerating to read. It’s the nature of the novel to, it hits home and it’s a learning curve for me too. Seeing the reality that we see on TV, soldiers doing tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. These men that Mila has created as her characters show the aftermath and the continuous battle they still have to fight each day, in their head and in their body. What you have to remember is that not every soldier will have a happy ending like Walker did and Mila did that through characters like Sanchez and Dodds their expression through voice or even art.

Rating – 4.5

We walk along the hallway to my room, neither of us talking. I’m having to concentrate on remembering what obstacles are where so that I can avoid them. I don’t want a white stick, but this groping around and having to hold onto the wall isn’t working so well. I must look like an idiot. Didi doesn’t say anything, though.

Is she looking at me? Can she see the smile I’m trying to hide? I tell myself that is doesn’t mean anything that she broke up with Zac. But I can’t completely snuff out the spark of hope that’s ignited inside my chest. Hope for what, I’m not sure. Why this girl? Why now? What am I expecting? I have to keep asking these questions. I barely know Didi. I don’t even know what she looks like, but it’s there- undeniably there- some kind of connection. Even now, as we walk along in silence, I’m so aware of her that my nerve endings feel like they’re being stroked with a feather. I’m so finely tuned to her that I can hear her footsteps from twenty feet away. I can hear it in her voice when she’s smiling. I can sense it when she enters a room full of people. I can even pick up on the smallest variation in her mood. Right now I can tell she’s buzzing slightly, though whether she’s nervous or happy I can’t quite tell.

When we get to my room, I push the door open and stand aside to let her through. She brushes against me and I get a sense of her height- she comes up to my shoulder- as well as a hit of whatever perfume it is she’s wearing, the one that reminds me of long summer days spent out on the water.

Mila Gray is the pen name for young adult author Sarah Alderson.
Having spent most of her life in London, Sarah quit her job in the non profit sector in 2009 and took off on a round the world trip with her husband and tutu-wearing daughter on a mission to find a new place to call home.
The contemporary thriller The Sound, was published in the US in May 2014, while Out of Control, a thriller with a focus on human trafficking, was released in May ’14 in the UK and May ’15 in the US.
Sarah is also a screenwriter. She adapted her first novel Hunting Lila for the screen (currently in pre-production) and is working on several other screenplays (multi-tasking is one of her favorite things).
Her first adult novel, Come Back To Me, was published in June 2014. The second, This One Moment, will be out in August 2015.