One Moment (review)

Maggie's boyfriend, Joey, is always up for a bit of illicit excitement, and sometimes she still feels the need to impress him. When he asks her to jump off a high rock ledge into their swimming hole, she therefore goes along until the very last minute, when something strikes her as off. The next thing she knows, she is alone on top of the ledge, with Adam, the anchor of their group, trying to coax her down the rock face and away from the body of her dead boyfriend by the edge of the water. While Maggie struggles to remember what happened before Joey jumped, the friends pull together and apart as they try to make sense of the horrific accident. Adam is especially tortured, and it soon becomes clear that Joey was keeping secrets from Maggie that Adam knew about. What emerges is a convincing and relatively low-key portrayal of the close bonds of friendship strained by tragedy and betrayal. McBride gets the gravitas of both Joey's death and his secrets just right; as painful as the whole situation is, it's not world-ending for anyone but Joey, and the others have to figure out how to live with present emotions rather than drown in past regrets. Maggie's response is particularly credible and ultimately healthy, as she finds an effective way to bring closure to a relationship that would eventually have ended naturally anyway. Readers looking for a sensitively handled drama with keen insight into the emotional lives of teens will enjoy this.