seriously romantic: seven days of you by cecilia vinesse

i think because i've been in the same position that the main characters of seven days of you are in, where you are moving across continents and countries and cultures leaving your friends and things you have come to love behind, it was easy to love this book.

i really understood sophia. the parts of your identity that are wrapped up in where you live and where you come from form the foundation of how you self-identify. sophia has lived in japan most of her life. she's got an american mother and a french father and has spent time in those countries too. but japan is what she knows, even though she is not ethnically japanese.

when i was in college i took this nineteenth-century european history class where we had one unit focused on the idea of nationalism and what establishes a nation's identity. is it language? is it geographic? is it cultural? and the reality is that it's complicated. it's a mix of all three.

for sophia, throughout the novel she is trying to find where her home is. if leaving japan leaves her without a home, is france that home? is it the us, with her mom? or is the phrase home is where the heart is more relevant? the truth is, home can be many things. but ultimately i think it's where you can be your truest self and know that you'll find love. and this is what sophia finds with jamie. and it's sweet and sad and there's that tiny bit of hope.

it's a hope worth clinging to i think.