Baby It's Cold Outside | Seven Days of Us Book Review

"She looks past their faces to the duck-egg cupboards and gleaming coffee machine. It all looks absurdly clean and cosy."

About halfway through Seven Days of Us, I started making a mental list of the order in which I would most like to slap/punch the characters in the face.*

Which isn't to say that I didn't like the book. Actually, I really enjoyed it. It is well-written, funny, dramatic and perfectly suited for curling up with over the December/January period when you can so incredibly easily put yourself in the shoes of almost each and every character, having (probably) just spent an extended period of time trapped inside with family yourself. Francesca Hornak is my favourite kind of author - one who writes realistic, flawed characters. Hence why, at around Chapter Five or Six, I started fantasising about throttling them.

Let's backtrack a little. Seven Days of Us centres around the painfully upper-middle-class Birch family, who on paper seem to be a Guardian-reading wet dream come to life. Dad Andrew is an ex-war correspondent turned restaurant critic for the World magazine (which I'm pretty sure is fictional within the world of the book, since a quick Google only brought up an American-based super Christian website), Mum Emma is a housewife and perfect hostess from noble stock, and daughters Olivia and Phoebe are, respectively, a doctor who spends most of her time in third world countries saving lives, and a media... something who lives the party-girl life in London with her fiancé George. George is a boarding school posh boy and a bit of a dick (not a spoiler, this is pretty obvious from the off), and they're all decamping from their Camden townhouse (complete with Scandi-inspired decor and design classics aplenty) to spend Christmas together at Emma's ancestral pile in Norfolk - quarantined, for a week (hence the title), due to Olivia being freshly back from Liberia, where a Haag epidemic is running rampant.

However, as in so many books about seemingly perfect families, not everything is as it seems! Olivia (who has a tendency towards being frustratingly holier-than-thou) has avoided spending the last several years avoiding Christmas with her family because of reasons**, and is also teenage-style head-over-heels in love with a fellow volunteer who oops! She violated the No-Touch rule with (not a spoiler, this literally happens on page 2), so she has to keep it on the low-down; Phoebe is a self-centred adult child still living with her parents (AKA every Baby Boomer's worst fear) - she calls them Mummy and Daddy and is obtusely oblivious to the glaring issues in her relationship with George - the least of which is the fact that not only do they not live together, but they've also barely spent more than a couple of days in a row together... oh, and he doesn't have a clue about her taste in jewellery (weirdly, a kind of big plot point); Emma is a little bit too into playing happy families, has an unhealthy attachment to her childhood home (which every other character comments on at least once), and happens to be keeping a cancer diagnosis secret (page 16); and Andrew is not only a bit of a pompous bastard, but has also just discovered that he has a long-lost American son (Jesse), who wants to meet him (page 13). Jesse, by the way, is a slightly stereotypical LA guy (gay, vegan, filmmaker, very into juices and has a therapist) who makes a bit of a leap of faith by deciding to fly to the UK to ambush meet Andrew without the latter having first replied to his introductory email.

In case you haven't guessed, the pacing is pretty fast when it comes to dropping the obligatory Big Secrets everyone is keeping.

If you think you can probably see where this whole family-hiding-things-from-one-another-whilst-also-not-being-able-to-escape-one-another thing is going, you're not the only one. I know I was certainly pretty sure by the end of the first 20 pages or so that I had a fairly clear idea of how everything was going to shake out. However, I was pleasantly surprised. While Jesse does, eventually, manage to infiltrate Weyfield (the 'draughty, slightly decrepit manor house' that Emma inherited from her parents), it happens a lot further into the plot than I was anticipating. And while the whole broken-family-coming-back-together theme doesn't exactly veer too far from the course, there are enough little twists and turns to keep it exciting. And to be honest, the plot isn't really the point of Hornak's book - the characters are.

Like I said, they are flawed and very, very real. The story is broken down first into days (the titular seven, plus a couple on either side), and then into the points of view of each character at various points in time throughout that day. The narrative remains third person at all times, apart from a few inserted emails and Andrew's columns, but the language changes slightly with each switch so that the reader gets a very clear impression of how each character thinks and is processing each new beat of information. By the end, they have of course all gone through fairly major changes and are doing and thinking things a little differently, but they stay 'in character', as it were, at all times. Attributes and  insecurities are brought out throughout the course of the week that were implanted in each character from the beginning. If you're a writer wanting to learn how to create well-rounded, believable, and simultaneously likeable and unlikeable characters, I would study Hornak's prose.

This is probably a good time to mention that, while I do have a physical copy of the novel, I ended up listening to the audiobook, read by Jilly Bond. Having listened to a lot of audiobooks recently (I've discovered they're a great hack to bypass the fact thay physically reading can end up being unpleasantly tiring for me at the moment), I've started to notice that the well-roundedness of the players in a story really starts to come out when you have someone reading to you, rather than you interpreting their voices for yourself. Sometimes with less developed characters, you end up subconsciously imbuing them with additional features in your head to help make them more real as you read. This is harder to do when you're listening to a book, because you already have the filter of the reader between your brain and the text. Are you still with me? Basically what I'm saying is, Jilly Bond does a great job of bringing the story to life vocally, and breathing life into the cast, because Hornak has created excellent source material. Her Phoebe voice, for example, is pretty much spot-on to what I had in my head when I started reading.

Finally, the tinsel-strewn elephant in the room. Yes, this is a book based at Christmas. And judging by the marketing and timing of the release, it was definitely aimed at those looking for a festive read. I started it in December and finished in early January, and I am definitely one of those people who loves Christmas obsessively in December (and, ok, the latter part of November), but avoids it like the plague for the rest of the year. I like to keep my Christmas shiny and special, not sullied with the grey sludgy sleet of the rest of the year. So, if I was reading this review I'd be thinking "ooh, I do fancy reading that but I'm not sure about reading a festive book out of the assigned festive period" - my answer to which is, don't worry. It's definitely what I'd class as a wintery book, but it isn't so holly jolly Christmas that it would feel like listening to Slade in July.

Read while:

Wearing | your biggest woolly jumper and daytime pyjama pants

Listening to | Carols from Kings is name-checked several times - otherwise curate yourself a playlist of all the cover songs John Lewis has featured on their Christmas ads since 2010 (non of which are actually, you know, Christmas songs), on repeat

Drinking | tea (earl grey, if you're feeling fancy) or hot chocolate - spiked or not is up to you, but cream and toppings are a must.

*that list, in case you're interested, goes as follows, from most to least slap-worthy:

1. George the Fiancé's brothers (middle then eldest)
2. George the Fiancé
3. Andrew the Dad
4. Emma the Mum's Friend Nicola
5. Olivia the Older Sister
6. Jesse the American
7. Phoebe the Younger Sister
8. Emma the Mum (maybe not a slap, but at least a good old shake)
9. Sean the Other Haag Doctor

**one of my only real quibbles with the book is that I never really understood exactly what these reasons are...