A review by jhstutzman
The Down Days by Ilze Hugo

4.0

I tried to read this on the release date and just couldn’t do it. Starting over a while later made it work. Reading a book about a pandemic, during a pandemic, was just a bit on the nose, yeah? A lot of the book is more about feeling than plot, like typical magical realism, but with some additional magical to it, alongside the disturbingly familiar realism. There’s some world building that seems to have either gone missing or been left to the reader to sort of invent into the book. But since it’s about that feeling or atmosphere as much as the plot, and this IS that atmosphere, it worked. I’m almost afraid to see what comes next from this author given how familiar this book ended up seeming.