Book Review: Six Days
Bride-to-be Gemma is devastated when her fiancé Finn doesn’t show up to the church on their wedding day. Largely uninterested, the police seem to believe he’s gone missing by choice and tell her he will likely either resurface within a week, or not at all. Thus the clock starts for Gemma to find Finn.
The newest release from novelist Dani Atkins, Six Days cements itself primarily as a romance, dabbling in elements of mystery. Its chapters take long detours from the missing fiancé at hand as Gemma traces back through her memories of their relationship, from their fumbling meet cute to falling in love, planning their future and encountering Finn’s commitment issues.
It’s a sugary, indulgent love story. Finn and Gemma’s first date reads like a list of adolescent fantasies of what grown-ups do, filled with flowers, limousines and Michelin star dining. Although just to bring her back down to Earth, their plans are foiled and Gemma ends up demonstrating what a bloke’s girl she is by being just as okay with fish and chips. She even - much to Finn’s amazement - drinks beer straight out of the bottle!
And there’s the rub; there’s nothing wrong with a bit of levity, but comprehending the decisions of this book’s characters requires the reader to subscribe to a weary set of heteronormative rules. Gemma is an undercooked protagonist, who at times reads like the embodiment of the scathing “cool girl” passage from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.
Her ambitious career as a journalist sets up glitzy industry parties where she can describe her outfit to the reader, without lending her any investigative skills that would help find a missing person. Her best friend Hannah is passingly described as having a “Mensa-level IQ”, a detail never to be explored again, although what does make the cut is several mentions of both women enjoying fast food despite their petite frames. And can we please just once, for Christmas, have a female romance protagonist who doesn’t bashfully skirt around the word “erection”?
Finn is given more nuance, although he represents a tired trope: that behind every man’s flaky behaviour is actually a childhood tragedy that will occasionally cause him to wake in a cold sweat or mournfully stare into the middle distance, and it’s the role of his female partner to drag the details of this tragedy out of him and Fix Him With Love. (Thankfully, the secret past trauma will never be something as messy and complicated as abuse or addiction. It will be a neatly sanitised yet unfortunate accident, preferably a shiny parental figure dying in a car crash or drowning while saving a child.)
Six Days offers plenty of opportunity for the reader to indulge in a bit of romantic fantasy, and Atkins’ unabashed attention to detail when describing lavish date nights is all in good fun. But the central question of whether Finn has left Gemma at the altar or is out there somewhere in grave danger seems let down by two-dimensional characters and a lack of red herrings.
The novel might serve its purpose as a light read; syrupy and pleasant enough, but missing enough meat to be memorable.
Six Days is available to purchase in stores and online now.