Thank you Netgalley and the publisher!

At first, I was so thrilled to read some bites of corona-lives from different perspectives, and seeing how it started for various people made me happy and even more intrigued but soon it get bored because It became so repetitive and predictable. The number one reason for that is the persons have almost the same conditions, similar lives, etc. so their perspectives are not unique. So I gave up after a while and couldn't even finish the book. But I hope to finish it one day, maybe after everything is over.

i really enjoyed reading this, it was a great history nonfiction book. It was a really well done book and felt like it was well researched.

Timely, "rather meta" Canadian collection of concise essays submitted by quality writers covering various stages and aspects of Covid-19 lockdown. Naturally there is some degree of repetition and overlap amongst the 100+ pieces but it doesn't impede on their value. In my Kindle version however, there is a distracting glitch whereby all instances of the fi, fl, and ft letter combinations in the body of essays are missing, and also the Th, tt, and ff combinations have disappeared from the essay titles.

I was struck by the line from Albert Camus's The Plague that Jim Upton included: "the only way to fight the plague is with decency." Some of my favorite pieces were the light-hearted Falling in Love Amid COVID-19 by Jim Olwell, and the heavy-hitting shorts by Caroline Vu and Andi Stewart about the Anti-Asian fallout that Trump precipitated. Love how he's referred to as "the orange incompetent president south of the border" and "Mr. Very Stable Genius".

Chronicling the Days celebrates the creativity energy that emerges from the artist’s survival mechanism. Much to enjoy in this book, both in terms of literature and historical context.

A year into the this pandemic and it's still dragging on....It's with nostalgia and last years optimism that I read this book. Who would have thought it was still on going now? And no end in sight.... Being an introvert, I thought the first 3 months were the best ever! Home, alone, reading, binge watching movies, etc... heaven! Then I started to miss family and friends, going to breakfast or dinner, shopping with my daughter, bookstores,... now it's just sad and depressing. Maybe another anthology where authors write about the pandemic one year later? We're living it, but it's for the historical record as most of us aren't keeping journals! Kudos Writers! I look forward to reading more by each of you!

How heavy my heart feels, reading this collection of short essays about the beginning of lockdown. It is a full year into the pandemic and I feel connected to every contributor for shared experiences of grief, sadness and fear, loneliness and boredom, watching Tiger King on Netflix, longing for hugs, feeling deep gratitude and love. COVID-19 everyday life is captured in this wonderful collection by Quebec writers, a time capsule for future high school students studying this time. I laughed (especially when reading a surprisingly joyful story about falling in love), cried, and had to put the book aside many times to take a break from a reminder of this reality we are still living. We truly are in this together. Ça va bien aller.

I liked the structure; it lends itself well to being read in any in between time you have to spare. I also really liked having a different perspective every couple pages - older people, young people, medical professionals, teachers, people living with young families, people living alone, etc.

However this was a difficult one to rate for me. It started out strong, the beginning felt really relatable; the writing is approachable and peppered with profound pieces (profound in the way that hearing a feeling you’ve had articulated for the first time feels).

Some of the essays were interesting like the one about the Persian roots of the word quarantine or the one about the history of the living room. Others were heartbreaking and haunting, like the person experiencing Asian guilt, those questioning where they will get their life sustaining medications is society breaks down, or those struggling with the decisions to not allow their grown children to come home because they are vulnerable. However eventually it just got a bit boring; I guess that’s the point - one of the major struggles of the pandemic for a lot of people is boredom, woven with anxiety, doubt, uncertainty - this was well represented in these essays.

I can imagine this becoming assigned reading in the future for university students to balance news coverage of the effects on the global economy, border shutdowns, mass layoffs, chaos in hospitals, etc. so they can understand what pandemic life was like for many ordinary people. Definitely not a page turner but I think it does a good job of capturing the general mood of the pandemic.

Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this ARC. We're around the one year mark of Covid-19 becoming our "new normal" but reading these essays felt like reading history because it feels like so long ago. We've all learned to adapt to the changes and things that we couldn't have imagined prior to quarantine now just feel commonplace. Vaccine rollouts and a new administration in the White House are bringing hope for a return to our B.C. lives but it was nice to not feel alone knowing that we all lived similar lives for a year.

This anthology of essays and poetry is the direct result of the pandemic that changed the world.  In April 2020, the Quebec Writers Federation put a call out to members to share their experiences during lock-down, a sort of "typical day in isolation" piece.  The result is this vast assortment of very personal and very heartfelt pieces that I think everyone can relate to on some level.  Some address their fears and frustrations, others find joy in the simple things around them.    Highly recommend (and to educators out there, I think you should look into adding this book to your curriculum and/or school libraries).

I am reading this book in March 2021, one year after the pandemic began… It is so interesting to find the remarks on what is new, terrifying, unfamiliar in the stories has become so common place in our every day lives. Alternately, it’s also interesting to be reminded of just how unknown everything was then, I think we may need a reminder of how serious things were/are/could have been, in the midst of what is now Covid complacency.

I don’t always like literary anthologies, or short story anthologies, but I thoroughly enjoyed the format of this book with its short excerpts that seems so real and genuine. It seemed like I was exchanging emails, or letters, with a familiar friend