This book is absolutely amazing from the first page to the last one, I finished it in two days and couldn’t stop reading it. The story contains the whole specter of emotions from sadness and crying to happiness and laughing. And despite it is based on heavy themes like loss, grief, pain, anger and many others, the book itself isn’t depressive, it is truly inspiring and uplifting without being cheesy.
The story is about two 35 years old women, who meet in the hospital. Annie Hebden is unhappy, divorced, mourning her terrible loss, stuck in her boring job, living with a young foreign gay flatmate, generally just surviving her imperfect life. Additionally, her mother is suffering with dementia despite her quite young age and no longer recognises her daughter, which brings Annie to a Neurology department in the local hospital. There she meets Polly Leonard and her life suddenly turns upside down the way she would have never imagined.
Polly is terminally ill with brain cancer and the doctors told her she had three months of life ahead, which taught Polly that time is too short to waste a single day. When she meets Annie, she creates a 100 happy days challenge, to show her how to enjoy every single moment of life. “It’s simple, really. You’re just meant to do one thing every day that makes you happy. Could be little things. Could be big.”
Polly is eccentric and basically everything Annie doesn’t want in a friend. Despite Annie isn’t really interested, Polly is determined to finally wake Annie up to life and during the following several weeks Polly changes Annie’s life in the way of forcing her to do things she would have never done herself, like talking her old friends, even to her ex-husband, changing her clothes or hair but also taking naked pictures, dancing in a cold dirty public fountain or going to the most dangerous roller coaster and many others. On the way they also change life of many other people around them.
Soon they become friends and gain strength from each other. However, despite they are having great time and Annie is slowly starting to realize that despite of what she went through, there still might be joy in her life, it is getting more and more clear that Polly’s time is running out and as she is getting weaker, she needs Annie’s help.
This book definitely must have rating 10/10. This time maybe even 11/10.