Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult is an adult fiction novel that takes place during the height of the Covid pandemic.
Diana O'Toole has her life perfectly planned out. Get the job, get the guy, the kids, the house in the suburbs... basically, the American Dream. So, she is quite miffed when a vacation of a lifetime, where she is sure her surgeon boyfriend, Flinn, is meaning to propose, gets put on hold because said boyfriend is being forced to work in preparation of an influx of patients.
Flinn convinces Diana to take the trip anyway, even though she is secretly hoping he will ask her to stay. And off she goes, to a tiny island in the Galápagos. But when she gets there she learns that the island is shutting down and now she is stuck with no place to stay and no way to reach Flinn.
As Covid 19 ravages the world, Diana feels very out of touch and is forced to examine the life she has and the choices she has made. And when her perfect plans are put under a microscope, she may not like what she sees.
It's not very often that I hate a book... but I hated this book. It felt superficial, I was bored and, quiet frankly, unbelievable. Maybe, it just felt too soon for all of this Covid fiction to be popping up, though I know we are bound to see it in "realistic" fiction moving forward, as it is a part of humanities story now. But I just couldn't get into it.
I didn't like Diana as a character, though I did like Beatrice. And I kept waiting for that twist at the end, where we aren't sure which of her stories are real. I don't know, I should bash the book because I know a lot of people who did really like it. It just wasn't the story for me. Because of this, this one gets a low two stars from me.
That's all for now!
-M-