56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard
This was my Book of the Month selection for July. It’s not actually being widely released until sometime in August, which is neat.
Ciara and Oliver have only just met, just started dating, when Dublin goes into lockdown. They both feel an intense connection and don’t want to have to go weeks without seeing each other. So, they make a bold decision. They move in together. Telling none of their friends or family, saying it’s just a temporary thing during lockdown and doesn’t mean anything serious. And then one of them turns up dead.
Mild Spoilers Ahead. You’ve been warned.
I wanted to like this book. I really did. The premise of it was fantastic. And to be one of the first books to capture the feeling of what the early days of the pandemic were like, I had high hopes. But this book just didn’t deliver for me. For the first thing, the way the book is laid out jumps around in time, which I usually don’t have a problem with. But, in this case, because it’s not laid out by concrete dates, just 23 days ago or 18 days ago, etc, it’s hard to have a fixed sense of when we are in the story. This isn’t helped by the changing perspective. We get Ciara’s perspective for the first 3 dates before we get Oliver’s perspective of the first. And then, as it turns out, we had unreliable narration for parts. So, now we get the “true” version of events from Ciara’s and Oliver’s perspectives. And it’s all just too much.
I also took some issue with the way the pandemic was presented. Now, maybe this is how it really was in Dublin in those days. But the characters are rarely shown wearing masks, even when in a crowded public department store. Because nobody else is wearing one. Now, living as I do in a small Republican-heavy town in the midwest USA, I understand that. I have often been the only one wearing a mask in a public space. I just find it difficult to believe that these characters didn’t wear them more, especially when one of them is desperately trying to avoid being recognized. And the fact that the author went out of her way to say how they had masks but weren’t wearing them disturbed me on some level.
But my biggest takeaway from this is that it felt like the book version of a Christopher Nolan movie. There were twists and turns and you never knew what was coming next. However, it all felt like the book was trying to feel more clever than it actually was. And by having the characters lie to us in their own heads, you never really got a sense of who they were. Or who they were changed with the wind. So, ultimately, I couldn’t really care what happened to any of them because I didn’t know which version of them to believe.
As much as I wanted to like this book, I can only rate it 2/5 stars. I legitimately had to put it down and walk away from it for a few days before I could come back and finish it. The premise was so good and, in my opinion, ultimately squandered. It didn’t have to be this complicated. But, that being said, I imagine there will be a lot of people who really enjoy this book. My own crotchety-ness may be holding me back from fully embracing this work.
KT Byrde Writes 