It was called Our Country Friends and, as obscure as my wee blahg is, I don’t really want to dis the author.

It wasn’t terrible! It was a LOT better than the traveling funeral book some of us read a few years ago. I picked Our Country Friends for my last read because it purported to explore the early months of the pandemic. I mean OUR pandemic, COVID-19, not a plague from history or some invented disease. Some people think it’s satire? I’m not sure…

A bunch of friends hole up at another friend’s mini-compound to ride out the virus for you know two or three weeks or whatever. Roight.

These people are friends? A few of them are supposed to be friends since high school! They are quite a bit younger than yer fav-o-rite blahgger but high school was a loooong time ago for them. But they don’t seem to like each other very much. Romantic entanglements abound ANYWAY.

There is no internet anywhere but in the main house and the plumbing doesn’t provide any more than a couple of showers a day. I mean for MULTIPLE people. I think I am in the minority here but I (occasionally) take two showers a day.

And yet. There is a gourmet cook amongst the “friends” and they were eating fancy dinners every night.

Okay… At the beginning of the pandemic would you have pulled up roots to go and shelter with a bunch of “friends” that you don’t really like (admit it)? In a place where you know (because you have been there before) that you won’t have internet in your “cabin”? No way! I stayed right here where I was working remotely from my not-fancy but comfortable house where Internet and hot running water are NEVER problems. I have always put my foot down (even pre-COVID) about going anywhere that doesn’t have internet or hot running water.

Obtaining food was not a problem on the Cornucopia Ann Arbor but in the early months of the pandemic it took a LOT of time and energy to figure out where and how to get it without going into a store and breathing someone else’s air. The book never talks about how they get their food.

All of the book characters are financially well-off or at least have access to family wealth if they need it. What possessed them to NOT shelter in place? In writing this, I think I have the answer to that. As much as the GG and I annoy each other if we have to be together 24/7, we are decent pandemic mates. Maybe these folks were afraid of being alone. That’s fair.

Anyway, the pandemic these folks were living through doesn’t seem to match the one I was living through (and still am). The book ends in fall 2020 and I certainly don’t fault the author for publishing it then. Sometimes you just have to stop somewhere.

I’m not sure whether I’d recommend this as a great book but am also curious to know what others might think, especially measuring it against their own COVID-19 pandemic experience.