Melki's Reviews > Day

A woman weeping on the subway is always a stranger. To others and, more likely than not, to herself.

We meet a family on April 5 of 2019, and spend some time getting to know them. Then it is April 5, 2020, and COVID 19 is running rampant through the population. Then we revisit everyone a year later. COVID is no longer a concern, but its existence has changed this family forever.

Part of me wants to give this book only three stars. I really didn't find any of the characters very engaging. I was most interested in their activities during the COVID year, and I wish the author had spent more time writing about that day.

I spent my "confinement" in the company of my husband and youngest son who was home from college. We honestly enjoyed having the time together, though, to be fair, our house is big enough that we could easily have "alone time" whenever we needed it. I couldn't imagine what it would have been like to spend those months trapped in a NYC apartment with a man I could barely tolerate, OR, alone in a cabin in Iceland, for that matter . . . until Cunningham imagined it for me.

In the end, it was the book's satisfying conclusion, and Cunningham's lovely writing that raised my rating to four stars. After all, you don't read paragraphs like this every day:

There's a song inside the song. It isn't beautiful, it isn't only beautiful, though it contains beauty like a plum contains its stone. It's the song that leaves nothing out. It's a lament and an aria. It's that old ditty about Frosted Flakes and it's an anthem to the perfume your mother wore when you were a child. It's a hymn sung by a girl with candles in paper cups, it's the cry of the rabbit when your father slits its throat, it's the sound of your wife whispering in a dream that's not about you.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the read.