Seven Days of Us - Review

Seven Days of Us  🌟🌟🌟🌟 3.5 stars rounded up

by Francesca Hornak 

Published October 17 2017 by Berkley Books

Overall, this is a really good character driven debut.  A family is in quarantine the entire week of Christmas because their doctor daughter Olivia was exposed to the deadly Haag  virus while on a mission in Africa.  There's another sister, Phoebe, who is preoccupied being engaged to George, who shows up at the house during the week and is thus forced into the quarantine as well.   

Everyone except Phoebe has a secret or two under wraps, and all are very intriguing.  Well, even Phoebe is hiding something but she hasn't  yet realized it.  I think the fact that we know these secrets and are wondering anxiously what will happen in the end makes this a 4 star book.  The characters are interesting  enough, except I would have slapped Phoebe and George multiple times if I  could have, and if I was the slapping sort.  Emma, the mom, got on my nerves a bit because I've  been in her situation and handled it a little differently, but she was a good person.  Olivia and Jesse the long lost bastard son were great.  Dad was a bit boring with his lack of awareness or caring (he is still evolving in midlife but not sure you'd call it a midlife crisis). The characters were a good mixture of annoying and heartwarming,  with about a 3 on my likeability scale.  So a 3.5.  

The Stolen Marriage - Review

The Stolen Marriage  🌟🌟🌟🌟
by Diane Chamberlain
Published October 3 2017 by St Martin's Press

Despite a rather slow beginning and a few flaws, this book, full of history from the 1944 era, eventually had my attention as the characters grew into themselves.  Set mostly in Hickory, NC, we are aware that there are men from town who have gone off to war, that this is a time when women and blacks were to know their places, and that polio was becoming  a force to be reckoned with.  While Tess' fiancé is in Chicago treating polio, she makes an irreversible error in judgment and marries a virtual stranger with an unwelcoming matriarch of a mother and sister.  Soon she discovers that her new husband has many odd behaviors  and secrets.  Some of the reveals I saw coming, but only to a degree.

As a little girl growing up in a small town during the 50's, I knew a few people with polio (a friend's cousin two years older who was beautiful but nevertheless taunted by school children for her limp, a boy two blocks away who was my oldest brother's age, my 7th grade math teacher),  and we knew how lucky my family was to have been untouched.  We experienced the polio vaccines administered by shots and then on sugar cubes (Blech!  I actually spit mine out when no one was looking, which then worried me for years to come).  Diane Chamberlain is a fine teller of real historical events with her own twists  added, and the makeshift polio hospital they built in Hickory in a fifty-four hour time period was fascinating to read about, enough so that Life magazine visited soon after its opening.   The author's version of the story teaches how we adapt to our circumstances and overcome adversity.  I thought she did an admirable job, and I thank the publisher and NetGalley for my advance copy.  

The Other Girl - Review

The Other Girl   🌟🌟🌟🌟

by Erica Spindler  

Published August 22 2017 by St. Martin's Press

Finished October 2 2017

When Randi was a rebellious fifteen year old, she one night hitched a ride with a guy and another girl.  It turned out to be the worst decision she ever made even though Randi managed to escape the guy's clutches before any physical harm was done.  But instead of the police taking her story seriously, they sent her to juvie for some weed found in her pocket. 

Cut to cop Miranda fourteen years later at a murder scene, and it's a gory one.  An old newspaper clipping is found there, and Miranda starts to flash back to that night years earlier when she was known as Randi.  The clipping and other strange things found at the scene cause her to wonder what ever happened to that guy and other girl all those years ago, and is Miranda strong enough to find out?

This one had me captivated all the way through.  It's a very interesting, well thought out story with not too many characters to clutter  it up.  Miranda is flawed (and somewhat messed up),  but not as much as most everyone else.  I did predict who the murderer was, but not until right before the book revealed it.  I am very grateful for being offered a pre-publication ebook, compliments of the publisher through NetGalley.  This is one I'll gladly recommend.