Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Reviews by Margie Smith, blog: margiereinssmith.weebly.com

If you'd like to be able to easily share your reviews with others, please join BookBrowse.
Order Reviews by:
Seven Days of Us: A Novel
by Francesca Hornak
What if? A disfunctional family is quarantined for a week (6/13/2017)
I enjoyed this first novel in spite of a few unrealistic coincidences and some predictibility. It involves a family of four—Andrew and Emma, the parents; and Olivia and Phoebe, adult daughters. They're quarantined during Christmas week in their stately, historic country home in northern England because Olivia has just returned from treating Liberian children who were infected with the highly contagious, often fatal virus, Haag (hmmmmm, sounds like Ebola.) The plot was rather predictable and the multiple coincidences were awkward, but it was nicely written, with well developed characters, each with his/her own voice, likes, dislikes, fears, suspicious, and secrets. Secrets! Oh my!! Secrets galore. The set up is full of secrets: Emma has a medical diagnosis she doesn't want to disclose yet because it might spoil the family's Christmas; Andrew has just received an email from Jesse, a young man he didn't know existed, who claims to be his son, the child of a former girlfriend; Olivia is in love with a fellow medical worker in Liberia, but there's a serious life-or-death complication; and Phoebe is engaged to be married to George but is having some doubts about the wedding that she is not admitting, even to herself. Of course all the secrets get spilled before the week is out. The quarantine is complicated by the arrival – and subsequent quarantine -- of George, then Jesse. But the characters are likeable, the story clips along, the family dynamics are fascinating and – even though I guessed correctly – I wanted to see what happened.
  • Page
  • 1

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.