56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

Hello everyone.  I hope your day is wonderful so far. 

The world has changed from the Covid virus. While being necessary to stay home many people have found it annoying.  Hubby and I are homebodies, so it hasn't been very difficult.  Wait, the constant cooking has been trying, worse yet the mountain of dirty dishes eating at home all the time creates.  Given that people have lost everything including people they love, dishpan hands seems like something to celebrate. Everyday I am crushed seeing the news and unendingly grateful for being able to stay home.  

I recently read 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard.  This is the story of two people, Ciara and Oliver, that meet at the very beginning of the pandemic and begin dating. Knowing that a quarantine is coming, and that they enjoy each others company, they decide to move into Oliver's apartment to weather the storm.  Told in differing time periods and from different perspectives the reader is left to answer two questions.  When police discover a single dead body in Oliver's apartment, who is it and what happened.  

Going into this story I was afraid it would concentrate too much on the virus.  To be honest, I've been reading up a storm because I want an escape not a reminder of the real world. However, 56 Days uses the quarantine as a vehicle to throw the characters together, it doesn't dwell on it.  The jumping timelines and narrators didn't bother me, but it rarely does.  If you dislike it, this isn't the book for you.  The story was interesting.  I have a bit of a complaint about the writing.  Some of the sentences just don't make any sense, if they do, they are awkward and have to be deciphered.  I really don't want to have to bring my Little Orphan Annie Decoder Pin to figure out what a book is saying.  Now, this occurred only a couple of times and in the first forty pages or so.  I just wonder why an editor didn't find it a stumbling block while reading too.  While I don't think this author has the smoothest writing style in general, her books are still interesting.  Obviously, I wouldn't want every author to write in the same way so I'll definitely read more Howard books.