Seven Days of Us by Francesca Hornak
My rating: 4/5 cats
to straight-up rip from dan’s headlines:
This is not the type of book I usually read. The publisher contacted me and I accepted a print ARC for some reason. I’m quite glad I did.
i had the exact same experience down to the “for some reason” – i remember agreeing to read the arc, but it’s all a bit hazy. i do remember thinking that this seemed similar to The Nest – both being debut novels described as “warm” and “funny,” featuring quirky, wealthy-but-dysfunctional families, and since i ended up really liking The Nest despite it being outside of my usual reading range (i’m more drawn to “dark” and “gloomy”) i decided to take a chance on this one and am “quite glad I did.”
my initial take on it was accurate – it was in many ways like The Nest, with somewhat less spoiled characters, a greater role played by life-threatening diseases, and a location-swap from new york to england, so there were a different set of social/cultural touchpoints. it’s probably a little sweeter than The Nest, but it’s a pleasant sweetness, not some cheerful bludgeoning by goodwill and cheer, even though it is a legit christmas novel.
it’s about the birch family: andrew and emma and their two grown daughters phoebe and olivia. andrew is the patriarchal journalist-turned-food-critic, precise and condescending, aloof and emotionally baffled. emma is the long-suffering maternal umbrella, more concerned with anticipating and fulfilling her family’s needs and tackling domestic tasks than addressing her own health and comfort. phoebe is the younger daughter – a little bit selfish, a little bit lazy, recently engaged but still living at home, more excited by planning the wedding spectacle than the actual marriage part. olivia is the selfless doctor whose experiences working in developing countries have kept her from home for several christmasses and made her a little frustrated and impatient with her family’s careless affluence and comparatively superficial priorities.
but this year, they will all be forced to spend christmas together – olivia’s return from treating haag patients in liberia on december 23 rings in the start of a festive weeklong family quarantine at emma’s enormous family manse; isolated, drafty, with spotty wifi and the possibility, however slight, that olivia’s exposure to a deadly disease with no cure will end up killing them all.
but the haag virus is not the only threat the family will face over their week of togetherness. theirs isn’t a jerry springer family, so it’s not at chair-throwing level, but it’s certainly awkward. the birches aren’t bad people, but they are their own people – individuals whose sharply-drawn personalities don’t necessarily mesh with those of their family, judging and fearing judgment, not understanding the perspectives of the other members of their family at all. they’ve never been a family that communicates well, and quarantine doesn’t make communication any easier, since each of them has a secret they’re trying to keep from coming out in the stress of the close quarters, holiday cocktails, and the unexpected presence of a couple of quarantine-crashers. it’s like a family-version of the breakfast club, all vulnerable and self-conscious behind the roles they maintain for each other, finding it easier to confide in strangers than family, but eventually coming together in a supportive holiday huddle.
this was an enjoyable book. that’s one of those beige words that reads like bloodless, noncommittal filler, but i truly enjoyed reading it, over the course of a single couch-sprawled vacation day.
okay, some of it was grass-sprawled
or chair-sprawled-while-other-people-built-firepits
in any event, it was kind of a perfect book to read at my dad’s house, which is so isolated that it feels like being in a similar situation, even though we were all much better-behaved than the birches, even those of us who did not contribute to the building of a firepit because reading.
four stars cats and change.
