56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

 

Hello my lovely readers!

The COVID-19 novels are coming! 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard is a prime example of it. I'd been itching to read a novel or just fiction in general. I've been so into my history books and non-fiction, that I needed something different. I know that the second to last book I reviewed was a novel (The Color of Justice), but I was left underwhelmed with it.

I'm actually very selective with my fiction. I honestly can't give you any criteria that I have, but it has to be a book that has an interesting plot and will keep me reading...and maybe be a little offbeat. Two memorable fiction novels I read in the past were The Woman in Valencia  and Adele.  They were superb. However, 56 Days....was just kind of middle of the road for me. Let's just jump right into it.

SUMMARY
56 days ago two people meet in a Dublin supermarket queue. This is just as COVID-19 was first detected in Ireland. 

35 days ago, Ciara and Oliver move in together after a whirlwind relationship and so that COVID lockdown restrictions won't keep them apart. No one knows they've moved in together.
Now, detectives find a badly decomposed body. So what happened? Did one of them commit the perfect crime?

MY THOUGHTS
This was just an average novel for me. It wasn't bad enough that I DNF'd it, but it wasn't amazing enough that I couldn't put it down. It was a boring thriller. 

Ciara and Oliver were fine characters as were the detectives (although I could've done without the cop-comedy), but nothing about this really wowed me.

It just took a lot of time for the story to get going and for Ciara and Oliver to even start living together. Then there was a ping-pong between timelines, which I'm fine with, but then it kept switching between Oliver's point of view and the detectives and Ciara's POV. It kind of got confusing too because the author kept rehashing the same scenes from different points of view at different times in the book. It could've been 150 pages shorter than what it was.

This book definitely gave me PTSD though! Having to relive the beginning of the pandemic was rough. Again, it was just an OK book. This won't be a book I'll keep on my shelf.