Book - Seven Days of Us by Francesca Hornak

                                              

In the previous post, I mentioned that I was reading Seven Days of Us, which I've managed to finish this afternoon. The premise caught my attention because it's not about a couple, as I assumed from the title, but about an English family, the Birch, and is set in Christmas 2016. The family consists of Andrew, a journalist who writes about restaurants, Emma, a stay-at-home, and their two adult daughters, Olivia and Phoebe. The story is told by multiple POV.

The eldest daughter, Olivia, who is in her early 30's, is a doctor who volunteers in humanitarian missions abroad and was in Liberia treating an epidemic. She is finally home for Christmas after many years. The problem, though, is that the entire family is required to stay in their old country house for a quarantine of 7 days.

Olivia and Phoebe, who's 3 years younger, don't get along and barely talk to each other - they're way too different. Olivia wants to travel to places in need of her medical help and doesn't want to spend much time with the family, but Phoebe is very close to her parents, especially Andrew. She is engaged to George, her boyfriend of 6 years, and all she can think about is in planning her wedding.

On the other part of the world, in America, a man named Jesse discovers that Andrew is his biological father. He was conceived when Andrew was working as a war correspondent in Beirut, in 1980, and was put for adoption when he was a baby. Desperate to hear from his biological father, Jesse sends him several e-mails, but Andrew doesn't know what to do, specially because he was already in a relationship with Emma when he was in Beirut. But in this dysfunctional family Andrew is not the only one hiding secrets...

Moving on to my opinion, I couldn't connect with the characters, I found them annoying. Although they're grown women, the daughters are treated like teenagers, specially Phoebe, who acts like one during almost the entire book. Besides, her relationship with George looks like it was taken from a Young Adult novel... She is spoiled and selfish, but her parents tolerate this behavior because Olivia has always been distant. Her recent experience made her feel angry and misunderstood, but her lack of effort to interact with her family eventually gets annoying.

The story has some far-fetched coincidences, it feels just too over the top and most events are predictable. I wasn't really a fan of the teenage-y writing style either, or the translation, as I've read it in Portuguese. I won't say it's bad - It's very entertaining, and even though it's over 350 pages long, it kept me so hooked that I've read it in just a few days. Besides, it features some important aspects of our society. 

Rate: 3/5