Seven Days of Us | Francesca Hornak

Some books just don't age well, through no fault of their own. I totally judged this book by the cover and title and it was a pleasantly nice, tied up at the end with a bit of bittersweet, kind of story. Olivia, who is a doctor, comes home from a mission in Africa where she was treating an epidemic of a deadly disease. She didn't particularly want to come home to her family, and to spend the holidays with them in their bit run-down family estate, but she did.

The trick was she had to quarantine, as did her family, because she'd been potentially exposed (despite PPE, which we all know understand) to this deadly disease. Which is where I kept getting hung up. She was quarantinining--but not alone! She was exposuring her entire family, and any friend, relative or delivery person who might have happened by, to this disease. Having lived through the Covid pandemic, and understanding more than we ever thought possible about transmissions of highly contagious diseases, the idea that this was a "Quarantine" seemed really silly.

Other than that, it was a quick, beach-y read, with some nice family interactions, relationships and reconciliations thrown in. There's a sad, but not completely surprising love element at the end involving a colleague (but more than a colleague) of Olivia's, but it's all resolved in a nice English "everybody's doing fine" kind of way.