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WISH YOU WERE HERE

by Jodi Picoult ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 30, 2021

Warning: Between lurid scenes of plague and paradise, whiplash may ensue.

A young woman finds herself at a Covid-induced crossroads in Picoult’s latest ultratopical novel.

Sotheby’s associate Diana O'Toole, age 29, and her surgical resident boyfriend, Finn, are planning a trip to the Galapagos in March 2020. But as New York City shuts down, Finn is called to do battle against Covid-19 in his hospital’s ICU and ER, while Diana, at his urging, travels to the archipelago alone. She arrives on Isabela Island just as quarantine descends and elects to stay, though her luggage was lost, her hotel is shuttered, and her Spanish is “limited.” What follows is the meticulously researched depiction Picoult readers have come to expect, of the flora and fauna of this island and both its paradisiacal and dangerous aspects. Beautiful lagoons hide riptides, spectacular volcanic vistas conceal deep pits—and penguins bite! A hotel employee known only as Abuela gives Diana shelter at her home. Luckily, Abuela’s grandson Gabriel, a former tour guide, speaks flawless English, as does his troubled daughter, Beatriz, 14, who was attending school off-island when the pandemic forced her back home. Beatriz and Diana bond over their distant and withholding mothers: Diana’s is a world-famous photographer now consigned to a memory care facility with early-onset Alzheimer’s, while Beatriz’s ran off with a somewhat less famous photographer. Despite patchy cellphone signals and Wi-Fi, emails from Finn break through, describing, also in Picoult’s spare-no-detail starkness, the horrors of his long shifts as the virus wreaks its variegated havoc and the cases and death toll mount. Diana is venturing into romantically and literally treacherous waters when Picoult yanks this novel off life-support by resorting to a flagrantly hackneyed plot device. Somehow, though, it works, thanks again to that penchant for grounding every fictional scenario in thoroughly documented fact. Throughout, we are treated to pithy if rather self-evident thematic underscoring, e.g. “You can’t plan your life….Because then you have a plan. Not a life.”

Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-984818-41-6

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Jodi Picoult

by Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

New York Times Bestseller

IT STARTS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.

The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.

Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | GENERAL FICTION

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Colleen Hoover Dominated Book Sales in 2022

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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Famed author Jodi Picoult novelizes the pandemic in new book 'Wish You Were Here'

Scott Simon

Mia Estrada

Ian Stewart

Melissa Gray

Author Jodi Picoult attends the STARZ mid-season premiere of "Outlander" at the Ziegfeld Theatre on April 1, 2015, in New York. Evan Agostini/Evan Agostini/Invision/AP hide caption

Author Jodi Picoult attends the STARZ mid-season premiere of "Outlander" at the Ziegfeld Theatre on April 1, 2015, in New York.

Author Jodi Picoult says she couldn't wrap her head around how she might tell the story of the pandemic — to both memorialize it and make sense of it.

Wish You Were Here, by Jodi Picoult Ballantine Books hide caption

Wish You Were Here, by Jodi Picoult

That was until she heard the true story of a Japanese tourist that ended up stranded in Machu Picchu due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Instead of going back home to Japan, the tourist, named Jesse Katayama, wound up staying in the gateway community of Aguas Calientes for months until the government offered Katayama special permission to see the historical site.

"I thought, oh, I've never been to Machu Picchu. I can't write about that, and I'm not going in 2020," Picoult told Scott Simon on Weekend Edition . "But I have been to the Galápagos. We took our kids there many years ago, and it's everyone's bucket list destination. And I thought, surely somebody got stuck there."

Picoult did find someone. There was a young Scottish man trapped in the Galápagos. She tracked him down and did an interview with him and the families he stayed with. From there, she began to craft her story.

In Picoult's 26st novel Wish You Were Here , released Tuesday — with rights already sold to Netflix — she centers on Diana O'Toole, who is on the verge of 30, an associate specialist at Sotheby's and about to fly off to the Galápagos with her boyfriend, Finn, who's a surgical resident. Everything is going according to plan for Diana.

Author Interviews

'small great things' author jodi picoult talks about inspired the novel.

Then March 13, 2020 happens. The pandemic.

Finn is told by his boss, as Picoult notes, "You are not allowed to leave the hospital. And he says to his girlfriend, 'Look, this vacation is paid for. You should go.'"

And so Diana does. But upon arrival, she is told the island will shut down for two weeks. Her accommodations are voided, and she has to find a way to get by on an island that does not have stable Wi-Fi or good cell service.

She's all alone on the island where Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was formed. Picoult said being there "it's like a beautiful metaphor."

Diana begins re-evaluating her life — her relationships, choices and herself — wondering when she returns back home, would she have evolved into another person?

"Diana really learns to re-evaluate the goals she had and the life she wanted and begins to ask herself, 'Why did I want those things in the first place?' - which I think is an experience that many of us had," Picoult said. "The pandemic was such a strange time because we were all so isolated, but we were all feeling the same things. You know, we just weren't connecting about it."

In the Galápagos, Diana learns a lot, not just about herself, but also her job and art, working with impressionist paintings.

"I kept thinking a lot about impressionism, and I kept thinking about how if you see a Monet painting from 6 inches away, it's a lot of blobs of pretty color," Picoult said. "But if you step back a few feet, you go, 'Oh, it's a cathedral; oh, it's water lilies' — because you have perspective. And we are just now beginning to get perspective on what 2020 was."

Jodi Picoult Turns Tough Topics Into Best-Sellers

As for Picoult, she said learned a lot too, noting how she's a "control freak." And like a lot of us, she said she learned that it's OK to grieve for the things you've lost.

But she also pointed to the idea that maybe some of us found new measures of success.

"Maybe it's not getting a degree or a promotion or a slot on a bestseller list," she said. "Maybe instead it is having your health and knowing your family's healthy, having a roof over your head, being able to hold the hand of someone who's dying," she said. "You know, and suddenly, I think having all these new senses of what our priorities are, that's what I'm really interested in. Maybe we will be better and stronger in the future because of it."

NPR's Ian Stewart produced Scott Simon's interview with Jodi Picoult for NPR's Weekend Edition. Kroc Fellow Mia Estrada adapted it for the web.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, wish you were here.

It's both fascinating and repelling to read a novel about New York during the worst of COVID, our modern-day version of the Black Plague. Many authors choose to skip any references to the pandemic, but in WISH YOU WERE HERE, Jodi Picoult writes unflinchingly about it, sparing us no details about the deaths, the few instances of people recovering from being intubated and the fallout from that intubation. This delightful yet horrifying book is thoughtful and life-affirming, which is exactly what we’ve come to expect from this prolific writer.

The plot is like a two-faced coin, with each side telling a different story. Diana O'Toole is a complex person. Her parents worked in the arts, and she loved making art from an early age. But Diana’s mother's chosen field, photojournalism, caused her to travel the world instead of spending time with her husband and daughter. In response, Diana has ensured that her career, the business of art, will allow her success and a comfortable lifestyle while still providing connection to what she loves doing.

"This delightful yet horrifying book is thoughtful and life-affirming, which is exactly what we’ve come to expect from this prolific writer."

In fact, Diana has planned her life carefully. There are goals she has plotted on the star chart of her lifetime: marriage by 30, house and children by a certain age, travel to specific places, retirement. She and her boyfriend, Finn, who is currently in his surgery residency, are on track to fulfill their joint expectations.

But life has a way of upsetting the best laid plans. When COVID raises its ugly head right before they are to leave for two weeks in paradise, the Galápagos Islands, neither of them has any way to predict what will happen. Finn breaks the news that he can't leave as his hospital is overwhelmed with patients infected with the virus, but he tells Diana that she should go without him. They won't get their money back from part of the trip, and he'll feel better if she's away. He'll be spending most of his time at the hospital anyway.

So Diana heads to the Galápagos, and she's the only tourist who chooses to stay on Isabela Island after the pandemic shuts down everything. She meets locals and befriends a troubled teenage girl named Beatriz, the granddaughter of the woman who has offered her a room. Beatriz's father, Gabriel, also takes Diana under his wing, showing her the island, even parts that tourists don't usually get to see. Her "vacation" becomes extended as the travel restrictions make it impossible for her to return home. And during those months, she has a lot of time to think about her parents, her estrangement from her mother, her career choices and her life plan.

There is a huge plot twist halfway through the book. It is a complete surprise and makes us reconsider Diana's experiences in the Galápagos and how they have changed her. Through Picoult's eyes and those of her characters, we see a fictionalized version of the reality that was and still is COVID. We witness, through Finn's anguished narrative, the horror and depression that medical professionals endured during the worst of the pandemic.

Perhaps most effectively, Picoult does what she excels at in her novels --- taking a real situation, focusing on a few participants, and exposing the intimate details of how those people are affected. In WISH YOU WERE HERE, she does that in a way that will leave each of us reflecting on our own lives. Did we live our life doing what was best for us, or for the world at large? And is it too late to change? These are powerful thoughts for a tumultuous time in our history.

Reviewed by Pamela Kramer on December 1, 2021

Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

Publication Date: June 14, 2022
Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN-10: 1984818430
ISBN-13: 9781984818430

Book Review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

Posted November 22, 2021 by WendyW in Book Review / 27 Comments

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things and The Book of Two Ways comes "a powerfully evocative story of resilience and the triumph of the human spirit" (Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Malibu Rising )

Diana O'Toole is perfectly on track. She will be married by thirty, done having kids by thirty-five, and move out to the New York City suburbs, all while climbing the professional ladder in the cutthroat art auction world. She's an associate specialist at Sotheby's now, but her boss has hinted at a promotion if she can close a deal with a high-profile client. She's not engaged just yet, but she knows her boyfriend, Finn, a surgical resident, is about to propose on their romantic getaway to the Galápagos--days before her thirtieth birthday. Right on time.

But then a virus that felt worlds away has appeared in the city, and on the eve of their departure, Finn breaks the news: It's all hands on deck at the hospital. He has to stay behind. You should still go, he assures her, since it would be a shame for all of their nonrefundable trip to go to waste. And so, reluctantly, she goes.

Almost immediately, Diana's dream vacation goes awry. Her luggage is lost, the Wi-Fi is nearly nonexistent, and the hotel they'd booked is shut down due to the pandemic. In fact, the whole island is now under quarantine, and she is stranded until the borders reopen. Completely isolated, she must venture beyond her comfort zone. Slowly, she carves out a connection with a local family when a teenager with a secret opens up to Diana, despite her father's suspicion of outsiders.

In the Galápagos Islands, where Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was formed, Diana finds herself examining her relationships, her choices, and herself--and wondering if when she goes home, she too will have evolved into someone completely different.

NOTE: Wish You Were Here will certainly be on my top 10 books of 2021!

Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult is an amazing book that I will not soon forget. I read this over a month ago, and the story is still stuck in my head, with no signs it will leave soon. This is a book about COVID, and some say it’s too soon, but I say, it’s just in time, and we need more books like this that illustrate the dire circumstances we are in with the pandemic.

Diane O’Toole has almost everything she wants. She has the job she’s always wanted and a loving boyfriend named Finn who she’s sure is about to propose marriage on their upcoming vacation to the Galapagos Islands. Her job as an art consultant at Sotheby’s is her dream job since her college days and she’s expecting a big promotion very soon. Her boyfriend Finn is a surgical resident in an NYC hospital.

Just before they are set to depart for the Galapagos Islands, the virus, known as COVID-19 starts to hit New York City. The day prior to when they are set to leave for the airport, Finn tells Diane that he can’t go on vacation because his superiors at the hospital have told everyone to stay in the city because they expect the virus to get much worse. After some discussion, Diane leaves for the vacation on her own.

This is one of those books where spoilers will really spoil the story, so I won’t say much more about the story, except it was gripping, intense, educational, and very emotional. As COVID is the main subject of the book, I would think some people who have really suffered during this pandemic and lost close friends and family, might find this book is out a bit too soon. I do think that it validates many of the feelings I’ve had during the pandemic, and the book definitely describes many of the horrors we’ve suffered, but it’s also an optimistic book. I was afraid that when I read it would be depressing. I will admit that the author describes many of the horrors of the pandemic, but also weaves a terrific emotional story around all the losses and difficulties of the pandemic.

Wish You Were Here will bring out all your emotions as you read it. Only a very talented author can write about such a devastating subject and turn it into such an uplifting story. And Jodi Picoult has proved what a talented author she is with this book. I received a complimentary copy of this book. The opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Book Review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

WISH YOU WERE HERE

By: Jodi Picoult

Published: November 30, 2021

Publisher: Ballantine Books

As a long-time fan of Jodi Picoult (I’ve even met her in person) I wasn’t sure I would enjoy a novel set during the pandemic. It is a topic I don’t want to hear about anymore and try to avoid the topic if at all possible. I wasn’t even sure I would like her newest book because a few of her’s have been a disappointment for me. But, don’t let this pandemic story turn you away. This grabbed my attention from the very beginning and pulled me all the way through with a few tears as well as some moments of reflection.

This is what Jodi Picoult said about writing this book:

When the pandemic first started, I couldn’t concentrate on anything else—I couldn’t write. I couldn’t even read. I was quarantined at home, paralyzed with fear at what COVID would do to my asthmatic lungs. When I was finally able to start working again, all I wondered was: How are we going to chronicle this pandemic? How do we tell the tale of how the world shut down, and why, and what we learned? Jodi Picoult

Diana O’Toole is about to land her largest art sale in her time at Sotheby’s. Her boyfriend, Finn, is a surgical resident in NYC and has mentioned this weird virus that they are starting to see at the hospital. All Diana can think about is closing the sale of the world-famous painting and then jumping on a plane with Finn for their romantic vacation (she is expecting a proposal) to the Galapagos Islands. The night before they are to leave, Finn reveals he can’t possibly go on the trip. Every available person is needed at the hospital as cases of the virus are rising rapidly. Diana can’t believe what he is saying. This virus can’t be that bad. He tells her to go anyway so they don’t waste their non-refundable trip and by the time she comes back, this will all be over.

As soon as Diana lands on the island she wonders if she made a huge mistake. The island has shut down, her luggage is lost, and she is stranded alone until the borders reopen. As she ventures out around the island and learns to be by herself, a new Diana emerges. A chance meeting with a teenage girl on the island moves her to reach out and get to know the girl and why she saw her cutting her arms.

As you can imagine, this novel is full of huge emotions. While Diana is on the island, WIFI is spotty and her few emails from Finn detail the exhaustion and devastation the virus is causing in the hospital. In Diana’s tropical bubble, she can’t imagine the horror and also begins to question her relationship with Finn. When the two-week window of quarantine has passed without any sign of it being lifted, Diana wonders if she will ever make it home again and if she does, will Finn be the same?

But if you have to remember to miss the love of your life…does that mean he’s not the love of your life? Jodi Picoult, WISH YOU WERE HERE

This compulsively readable fiction is similar to recent books by Laurie Frankel or Taylor Jenkins Reed. A shocking twist at the center of the novel, which is trademark Picoult, will send you reeling and turning back the pages for clues. There are themes of betrayal, family dynamics, forgiveness, and renewal. Picoult immerses you in the beauty and peacefulness of the Galapagos. Her use of metaphors, while Finn is drowning at the hospital and for Diana’s experiences on the island, is so completely spot on that I highlighted passages in nearly every chapter.

There are two ways of looking at walls. Either they are built to keep people you fear out or they are built to keep people you love in . Either way, you create a divide. Jodi Picoult, WISH YOU WERE HERE

In the book, Picoult references a COVID story in the Cedar Rapids Gazette which was surprising as that is near where I live. I tried to find the news story she was referencing to see if it was true, but was not able to find any links to similar stories so I’m not sure if that part of the story is fictional or not. She also writes that Diana’s mom in the story grew up in McGregor, Iowa. I would love to know why she chose this very small town in Iowa near where I grew up along the Mississippi Rivier and what its significance was. It isn’t often there are Iowa references in stories, especially one set in NYC and the Galapagos Islands. But, fellow Iowans will appreciate the connection.

Grief, it turns out, is a lot like a one-sided video conversation on an iPad. It’s the call with no response, the echo of affection, the shadow cast by love. But just because you can’t see it anymore doesn’t make it any less real. Jodi Picoult, WISH YOU WERE HERE

Picoult’s character, Diana, has planned out her whole life and everything was falling into place when COVID hit. I am sure there are a lot of readers that will be able to relate to the incredulous feelings, the frustration, the fear, and unfortunately, the grief that hit many of us during these long pandemic months. Even though you may feel like a story set during a pandemic isn’t for you, I urge you to give this one a try. Picoult takes great care to not bury the reader in the hot-button issues or overload us with details. There is just enough to remind us that we are, much like Diana and Finn, resilient and yet forever changed by the pandemic.

“You can’t plan your life, Finn,” I say quietly. “Because then you have a plan. Not a life.” Jodi Picoult, WISH YOU WERE HERE

Click HERE to read an excerpt from WISH YOU WERE HERE. This would make an excellent choice for book clubs and Picoult has created a comprehensive book club kit including discussion questions, recipes from the story, a music playlist, and photos from her own research trip to the Galapagos Islands. Get the kit, HERE .

To purchase a copy of WISH YOU WERE HERE, click the photo below:

Thanks to the publisher for sending a copy of this book for the purpose of this review. This review is my honest opinion. If you choose to make a purchase through the above links, I may receive a small commission without you having to pay a cent more for your purchase.

Posted Under Book Review , Coronavirus , fiction , Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult's Emotional New Book, Wish You Were Here, Is a Must Read Set During the Pandemic

Jodi Picoult's newest novel, Wish You Were Here ($20, originally $29), is the first of hers I've read in a decade, but it has certainly gotten me hooked on her writing style once more. The novel begins on March 13, 2020, on the eve of a trip to the Galápagos that 29-year-old Diana O'Toole is taking with her boyfriend, Finn, who she just knows is going to propose on the romantic getaway. After all, she turns 30 in just over a month, and her life plan concerning her relationship and career goals is right on track according to the timeline she set in her head.

That is, until Finn comes home from his job as a surgical resident and tells her there's no way he'll be able to go on the trip with the hospital filling up rapidly with COVID patients. Not knowing what is about to hit the entire planet, Diana listens to Finn and reluctantly goes on their nonrefundable vacation to the Galápagos alone, but it's far from the dream vacation they'd planned. Her luggage is lost, her hotel is closed, the whole island of Isabela is on a 2 p.m. daily curfew, there are no ferries back to the mainland, and within an hour of arriving, desperate for a meal, she's blistered her hand touching an apple with skin poisonous to the touch.

Wish You Were Here is a deeply emotional novel that captures the beauty of the Galápagos juxtaposed with the terror and panic we all felt in the beginning of the pandemic.

Throughout the island's two-week lockdown — and then some — Diana navigates her feelings of isolation while staying with a gracious hotel employee whose grandson isn't thrilled about the unexpected tourist guest. She desperately tries to reach Finn, but with spotty WiFi, she's only able to receive some of his grave messages about life as a front-line worker in New York City. Despite having guilt over leaving Finn, Diana starts to feel the pull of another life without such a grand plan and wonders, if you stop planning and start living in the moment, would your choices be the same?

Wish You Were Here is a deeply emotional novel that captures the beauty of the Galápagos juxtaposed with the terror and panic we all felt in the beginning of the pandemic, when information was limited and the rising death toll was enough to awaken the anxiety in the calmest of people. In the midst of a global crisis, alone in the place Darwin's theory of evolution was born, Diana starts to realize that you can't necessarily move forward without losing something and that her prescribed life plan may not have the perfect outcomes she once thought it would.

Standout Quote

"I know I should be grateful to be safe and healthy and in a gorgeous bucket list destination. I know this was the perfect time for this to happen, with my job in limbo and you stuck at the hospital. I also know that when you're in the thick of living your life, you don't often get to push pause and reflect on it. It's just really hard to sit in the moment, and not worry if pause is going to turn into stop."

This book is based on a reality we've all lived through, especially those of us living in New York City like Diana and Finn. Be prepared to relive some of the more terrifying and helpless moments of spring 2020, but on the other hand, with Diana in the Galápagos, know that there are so many moments of calm, beauty, and reflection that will settle some of the panic.

Where You Should Read It

Crack this one open somewhere cozy, where you feel safe and relaxed.

Read This If You Like . . .

Books based on real events; stories that take place in beautiful, idyllic locations; Picoult's other novels; books with subtle twists; and stories about finding yourself and what makes you happy.

POPSUGAR Reading Challenge Prompt(s)

This novel can check off more than one 2021 POPSUGAR Reading Challenge prompt; just pick the one that fits best for you.

A book that's published in 2021
A book that has the same title as a song ("Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd)
A book set mostly or entirely outdoors
A book about art or an artist

How Long It Takes to Read

I polished off this 310-page book in about six hours. I read it in chunks before bed over the course of four nights, but if I had the consecutive time, I could have easily finished it in one day spent reading.

Give This Book To . . .

Your friend who has their life all planned out, the people you read books with throughout the pandemic, anyone who loves Picoult, someone whose dream it is to go to the Galápagos.

The Sweet Spot Summary

On the eve of a trip to the Galápagos on which Diana O'Toole is sure her boyfriend, Finn, is going to propose — it's part of the grand plan of her life, after all — the world begins to shut down due to the coronavirus. As a surgical resident, Finn is forced to skip the trip due to the hospital filling up with COVID patients but urges Diana to go alone so as not to lose out on the nonrefundable dream vacation. Despite her hesitation, Diana flies to the Galápagos and arrives at her hotel, only to find that it, along with the rest of Isabela Island, will be shut down for the next two weeks. Taken under a hotel employee's wing, Diana spends those two weeks — and then some — isolated in the Galápagos, attempting to connect with locals, and trying desperately to contact Finn. Soon enough, Diana's lonely "dream vacation" causes her to face the answer to the question: what happens when you're too busy planning your life to live it?

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Review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

Complimentary Review Copy Provided by Publisher Through NetGalley

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things and The Book of Two Ways comes “a powerfully evocative story of resilience and the triumph of the human spirit” (Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Malibu Rising )

Rights sold to Netflix for adaptation as a feature film

Diana O’Toole is perfectly on track. She will be married by thirty, done having kids by thirty-five, and move out to the New York City suburbs, all while climbing the professional ladder in the cutthroat art auction world. She’s an associate specialist at Sotheby’s now, but her boss has hinted at a promotion if she can close a deal with a high-profile client. She’s not engaged just yet, but she knows her boyfriend, Finn, a surgical resident, is about to propose on their romantic getaway to the Galápagos—days before her thirtieth birthday. Right on time.

But then a virus that felt worlds away has appeared in the city, and on the eve of their departure, Finn breaks the news: It’s all hands on deck at the hospital. He has to stay behind. You should still go, he assures her, since it would be a shame for all of their nonrefundable trip to go to waste. And so, reluctantly, she goes.

Almost immediately, Diana’s dream vacation goes awry. Her luggage is lost, the Wi-Fi is nearly nonexistent, and the hotel they’d booked is shut down due to the pandemic. In fact, the whole island is now under quarantine, and she is stranded until the borders reopen. Completely isolated, she must venture beyond her comfort zone. Slowly, she carves out a connection with a local family when a teenager with a secret opens up to Diana, despite her father’s suspicion of outsiders.

In the Galápagos Islands, where Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was formed, Diana finds herself examining her relationships, her choices, and herself—and wondering if when she goes home, she too will have evolved into someone completely different.

Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult is a poignant novel that takes place during the early months of the Covid pandemic.

Diana O’Toole and her boyfriend, surgical resident Finn Colson have a perfect vision of how their lives are going to go. They are about to embark on a trip to the Galápagos where Diana is sure he is going to pop THE question. Instead, COVID strikes and Finn’s vacation is canceled as New York is hit hard by the new virus. At his insistence, Diana goes on the trip where nothing goes as planned as travel is halted, everything shuts down and she remains stuck on the island. Thankfully, she is offered a place to stay and Diana befriends the kindhearted woman’s great granddaughter, Beatriz. As the days stretch into weeks, she also becomes friend with Beatriz’s father, Gabriel Fernandez. While on the island, Diana begins to questions some aspects of her life.

Without a reliable cell signal, Diana finds it difficult to remain in touch with Finn. His emails come through sporadically and he details the horrific toll COVID is taking on New Yorkers. He also reveals, in heartbreaking detail, how helpless he feels when patient after patient succumbs to the virus. In contrast, Diana’s days are spent exploring the natural wonders and beauty of Galápagos.

Wish You Were Here is a beautifully rendered novel that will resonate with readers. The vivid and realistical portrayals of the early days of COVID are especially heartbreaking given how many people lost their lives. Diana undergoes an unexpected transformation as her perspective is reshaped by her experiences. As a doctor on the frontlines, Finn’s accounts of the care and subsequent deaths of patients is heartrending. The beauty of Galápagos springs vibrantly to life and paints a stark contrast to ravages of COVID around the world. With an absolutely jaw-dropping plot twist, Jodi Picoult brings this incredible novel to an unpredictable yet satisfying conclusion.

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Wish You Were Here (Review, Recap & Full Summary)

By jodi picoult.

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult, a novel set during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic about a young woman who ends up stranded on an island in the Galapagos.

Set in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Wish You Were Here is about an ambitious young woman, Diana, who gets stranded on Isabela Island in the Galapagos Island by herself when the island goes on lockdown. Her boyfriend, Finn, who was supposed to be there with her, is busy tending to COVID patients at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

What was originally supposed to a romantic two-week vacation becomes something quite different, and Diana ends up with a lot time to get to know the island, the locals and to reflect upon her own life.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

The two-paragraph version: In March 2020 towards the beginning of the pandemic in the U.S., Diana O’Toole travels to Isabela Island in the Galápagos on vacation by herself after her boyfriend, a doctor, has to stay behind to tend to COVID patients. She becomes stranded there when the island goes on lockdown, and she meets Gabriel Fernandez and his daughter Beatriz. Over the next two months, she reflects on her life and becomes romantically involved with Gabriel. She also helps Beatriz, who is struggling with coming out as gay. In the U.S., Diana’s mother (who she had a complicated relationship with) passes away from COVID.

One day, Diana gets caught in a riptide, and when she awakes she learns she’s in the U.S. and has been being treated for COVID for the last 10 days. She never went to the Galápagos and instead she hallucinated the trip. As Diana tries to make sense of her memories (were they a dream? was it an out of body experience? was it a vision of the future?), she also learns her mother never died and works to resolve her issues with their relationship. Eventually, Diana realizes that even if it wasn’t real, the experience changed her. She decides to change her career and break up with her boyfriend. In the Epilogue, Diana travels to Isabela Island in May 2023. She encounters someone in the same manner that she met Gabriel in her dream. The book ends as she turns around to see who the person is.

In Part One , the book opens on March 13, 2020, and coronavirus cases have just started being detected in the U.S. Diana O’Toole is an ambitious and driven 29-year-old working for Sotheby’s, and her boyfriend Finn is a doctor at New York-Presbyterian. Diana meets with the infamous Kitomi Ito (a fictional stand-in for Yoko Ono) regarding the upcoming auction of a very famous painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec . Securing the painting for Sotheby’s was a huge coup for Diana, but today Diana gets the unfortunate news that Kitomi wants to hold off on the auction to limit the spread of coronavirus.

Diana and Finn are supposed to travel to the Galápagos the next day, but Finn ends up staying behind since the hospital needs him. Diana travels alone, but arrives at Isabela Island to learn that it’s under a two-week lockdown due to the virus. Everyone else is leaving, but she impulsively decides to stick around. When she finds out the hotel she booked is also closed, Diana is relieved when an old lady (“ Abuela “) lets her stay in the tiny apartment attached to Abuela’s house.

Diana soon meets Abuela’s son Gabriel and an unhappy 14-year-old girl named Beatriz, who is Gabriel’s daughter with his ex-wife. Beatriz and Gabriel show Diana around the island. Eventually, the two week lockdown turns into two months. Over that time, Diana has limited cell reception and WIFI access, but she gets regular e-mails from Finn detailing the progression of the virus in the States. Diana’s mother with dementia, who was always distant with Diana growing up, gets COVID and passes away.

Meanwhile, Diana also feels a romantic connection with Gabriel and they sleep together. Diana also gets to know Beatriz and learns that she is sad and self-harming because she was rejected by a girl she likes who was too scared to come out to her parents. Eventually, Beatriz comes out to her father, who is accepting of her, and they’re able to start working on their estranged relationship.

One day, Diana and Gabriel go swimming, and Diana gets caught in a riptide. When she awakes, she’s still alive, but she learns that she’s actually in the U.S. Apparently, she’s been ventilated for the last 5 days and has been being treated for COVID for the last 10 days. Diana is informed that she actually never went to the Galápagos and her memories of it are all some type of hallucination or dream .

In Part II , Diana is still recovering from COVID and has to undergo rehab to re-learn how to move, walk and eat. With much effort, she eventually gets released from the hospital.

Diana also learns that she’s been furloughed from Sotheby’s, which means she is now jobless. She starts considering going back to school to study art therapy. Diana also starts to rethink her relationship with Finn, which she realizes was more suited to the person she was before. However, her experiences on Isabela Island — real or not — have changed her and she’s no longer sure they want the same thing.

Meanwhile, she tries to make sense of her memories that feel very vivid and real to her. Diana starts looking into survivors who have similar stories as hers about vivid hallucinations. Possible theories include it being merely a hallucination as a bodily response to stress or perhaps it’s an out of body experience or alternate reality or something else altogether.

At the same time, Diana learns that her mother is still alive and becomes determined to take the opportunity to spend time with her while she can. She starts visiting her mother frequently (from afar due to COVID restrictions), even though her mother’s dementia means that she doesn’t recognize her. She makes peace with her mother being an imperfect and distant mother during her childhood. There’s eventually a COVID outbreak at her mother’s assisted living facility, and her mother falls ill. Diana goes to see her, and her mother’s memory is temporarily clear again. They share a moment and her mother soon passes away.

Soon afterwards, Finn proposes to Diana, but she turns him down, saying that he did nothing wrong, but he’s not right for her.

In the Epilogue , it’s now May 2023. Diana has completed her art therapy degree and has her own practice. She travels to Isabela Island. At the tortoise enclosure, someone stops her as she reaches inside, which is same manner that she met Gabriel in her dream. The book ends as she turns around to see who the person is.

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

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Book Review

Wish You Were Here is Jodi Picoult’s take on a novel about the pandemic. It opens on March 13, 2020, when cases of the virus had just started being reported in the United States.

The main character of Diana is an ambitious and driven New Yorker who is working for Sotheby’s on art acquisitions. She has planned a vacation to the Galápagos with her boyfriend Finn, but he’s a doctor at New York-Presbyterian who ends up having to stay to care for COVID patients. Instead, Diana goes alone, gets stranded there and in the process ends up reflecting on various aspects of her life and relationships.

For most of the book, our protagonist Diana is stuck on Isabela Island in the Galápagos, and much of the narrative is devoted to her exploring her surroundings and getting to know a local family. The book also describes the progression of the pandemic through e-mails from Finn in New York.

As you might expect, Wish You Were Here feels a little heavy, despite the picturesque, sun-kissed setting where most of it takes place, partially because of the time period it’s in. It’s also worth noting that the general pacing of the book is a bit slow.

In Wish You Were Here , Jodi Picoult seems to be trying to capture what was going on that year and tapping into the collective self-reflection that many people went through that year.

In this story, Picoult explores Diana’s professional aspirations, her romantic relationship with her boyfriend and her relationship with her mother with dementia. The story also focuses on a father and daughter she meets in the Galápagos who are going through their own difficulties as well.

Some Criticisms

As a warning, it bothered me quite a bit how often and how casually the various characters broke things like quarantine or lockdown rules or put other people at risk of possibly contracting COVID. At times it felt like they were treated as inconveniences as opposed to life-saving measures. You might want to consider if reading about instances of these types of things will be upsetting to you, especially if you’ve lost someone close to you to COVID.

Beyond that, the short version of this review is that: I am a little surprised by the many positive reviews this book has gotten. To be totally honest, I was often bored reading this book and struggled to stay interested throughout most of it.

Having just gone through (and technically we’re still going through) the pandemic, those parts felt like a retread of stuff I already knew. I followed these stories pretty closely at the time they were happening, and I don’t think I learned anything or came away with any type of novel perspectives. Sure, the topic is timely, but so what?

As for the other parts of the book, a lot of it seemed to be offering up surface-level type insights. At one point there’s a section about how “anything can be art” or how “falling can feel like flying” — and it just seemed like a mish-mosh of sentiments I’d come across before in other forms.

The book takes a turn part-way through the latter half of the book. At this point the narrative manages to be even slower paced than before, and I really struggled to finish it. I think some people will appreciate the message it imparts at the end, but for me it seemed like a fairly long-winded way to say things that I didn’t find to be all that impactful.

Read it or Skip it?

Others have described this book as “moving” or “emotional”, but I really felt very little while reading this. I’ll admit that it sounds like I’m in the minority here though, so perhaps your mileage will vary.

In general, I have a hard time recommending Picoult’s books to people. Of the ones I’ve read, I’ve found that they tend to be fairly slowly paced and littered with overlong lectures on various academic topics. There’s always lengthy stretches where the book drags severely.

Overall, I sadly did not enjoy this book, but I’m curious to hear from others who did like this book though! What parts of it spoke to you?

Are you reading this or thinking about reading this? Share your thoughts below!

See Wish You Were Here on Amazon.

P.S. If you’re interested in reading a pandemic-related book that I liked, Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague is set in the late 1500’s in England during the Black Plague, and it’s a great read that reframes the story of the life of William Shakespeare through the lens of his wife, Agnes (Anne) Hathaway.

Spoiler-ish Thoughts Start Here

I found the timeline of the book distracting and it made the whole book make less sense. When she wakes up from her “dream”, we learn that it’s March 24th, 2020. However, regardless of whether it was a dream or some type of out of body experience, I couldn’t tell if Picoult purposely included events from the future or if it was some type of error on her part.

If it was a dream up (or experience in a secondary form), then are we supposed to believe she dreamt up specific details about the how the pandemic would play out in the future?

She dreamed up letters where her boyfriend writes about mask requirements back in late-March 2020 when that literally wasn’t a thing that existed? CDC mask recommendations didn’t start until April 2020 . Mask requirements in NYC began in mid-April . In fact, in late March, the CDC was still actively discouraging general use of masks.

Also, she dreamed up a Navy barge being sent to NYC? That was announced in the last week of March. She also dreamed up images of bodies piled up in refrigerated trucks? That also didn’t happen yet in mid-March 2020 .

The alternative is that she somehow had an out of body experience where she time-traveled into the future? That seems a bit weird. I mean I can buy the idea that not everything that happens in life is explainable, but time-traveling out-of-body experiences is a bit out there.

Anyway, I think there is purposely supposed to be some ambiguity there as to what really happened, but the muddled timeline was kind of a distraction for me — especially since the character of Diana doesn’t address it in the book at all so I couldn’t tell if it was an oversight or if it was specifically meant to be events from the future.

Wish You Were Here Audiobook Review

Narrated by : Marin Ireland Length : 11 hours 47 minutes

Hear a sample of the Wish You Were Here audiobook on Libro.fm.

Discussion Questions for Wish You Were Here

What were your initial impressions of the character of Diana? How did that shift throughout the book? How does her attitude shift throughout the book?
Why do you think Diana starts to feel disconnected with Finn and what did you think of his character? Why do you think Diana cheats on him and breaks up with him later?
What did you think of the relationship between Gabriel and Beatriz? Do you think they would have managed to figure out a way to start working through their relationship if Diana hadn’t been there?
What did you think of the plot twist going from Part I into Part II? Did you see it coming or was it surprise to you?
What did you think of Diana’s relationship with her mother, and why do you think she’s able to make peace with her relationship with her mother? Do you think you would’ve done the same? Why do you think it was important to her to see her mother face-to-face before she died?
What parts of this story spoke to you the most?
What did you think of Rodney’s comment to Diana that getting COVID is the first truly difficult thing that’s ever happened to her? Do you think his comment was fair?
By the end of the book, what do you think was the explanation for Diana’s experience in the Galapagos? Was the resolution of this satisfying to you?
What do you think happens after the final scene described in the Epilgue?

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of Wish You Were Here

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31 comments

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I thought about reading this one and didn’t because, honestly, it sounded kind of boring. Excellent review and thanks for the info!

I hurried through the first part of Wish You Were Here, because I had checked two books from the library at the same time. I’m a slow reader and thought it would take too much time. I was surprised by part two, which I read slowly! I enjoyed it immensely, fascinated with Diana’s co-experiences. Thank you, Jodi Picoult

When she was able to go and pick up some things at the little store on Isabella Island, they had masks with patterns on them… That really bothered me because those weren’t a thing until a little later in the pandemic. There is no way those masks would have been in that store already at that time.

I enjoyed your review more than the book, probably because your sentiments echoed mine. However, I would be more harsh on grading- 1.5 to 2 stars. The second half of the book was boring and nonsensical. The Galapagos narrative section was the most interesting, and the main characters far more compelling than the American ones. I would have much rather seen the conflict, and ultimate resolution, of Diana choosing which world to inhabit. Part Two was DOA for me.

I have enjoyed some of Picoult’s previous efforts( wide range of hit and miss) but the last two have been unsatisfying. Forrest Gump would say her writing is like a box of chocolates.

I have read many Jodi Picoult books and have enjoyed them all. I was dismayed to discover that the author seemed to base two characters on John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In addition she appears to have copied a scene from Grey’s Anatomy where one of the doctors mistakenly ordered booties instead of the much needed masks. One could say that Diana’s adventures in the Galapagos follows Meredith’s dreams on the beach in Grey’s Anatomy. Deliberate? Mistake? Only the author knows.

Read the book – thankfully from the Libby app ! It seemed interesting at the start. It later became a struggle to get through – I’ll say no more.

For all the emotional realism of COVID-related days turning into years and real life struggles, this book doesn’t capture any of that. Diana is selfish, and I ultimately don’t really care a lot about her in the end.

Thanks for your review. I have now given up after reaching the poisonous apples. The first mention of COVID I hated the book, there is no mention on the blurb. Aren’t we tired of this who wants to escape in a book of fiction to hear false statements. Did we know to socially distance as a term as early as March? No way. I’m returning this book tomorrow, have been a fan of Jodi in the past now I’ll read a sample before committing.

I did not like the book and would not recommend this book. Actually toward the end I skimmed the pages. It was a depressing book. I like her books but not this one. Would definitely not recommend it!

I don’t plan to read this book. I happened to be in the Galapagos Islands during the last week of February 2020. When I returned to the USA, Covid had really spread around the globe. Guayaquil is Ecuador’s gateway city to the Galapagos Islands, and it had a huge spike of Covid cases early in the pandemic. By late March 2020, Guayaquil’s morgues were overflowing, with dead bodies in coffins left on the streets. There are tales of people dying at home with dead bodies lefts for a while waiting for the overwhelmed city morgue to collect them. I counted my blessings that I left had returned safely. I’m not sure how the book addressed this travesty, but there is no way anyone would have enjoyed a holiday there or the Galapagos Islands.

Iagree with everthing you’ve written here. I just finished the book. Very disappointed.

6 ft tall Galapagueños? Exchanging dollars for local currency? No mention of the fact that Ecuador had a huge covid spike before NY? Postcards in the mail? Did she get her info on Galapagos/Ecuador from a trip in the 90s… I get it’s a dream, but at least she could get the local currency right.

So interesting, I didn’t know the currency there is the US dollar. If I had known that before reading, that would have definitely annoyed me! But what does your comment about postcards mean?

Struggling w this book. I usually enjoy this author a lot…this feels like a predictable romance novel. Missing Jodi’s normal edge.

I actually read this book in one sitting. Without getting into the out of sequence details which is poetic license and I did not have an issue with because this is not a history lesson on the pandemic but a woman’s journey of discovery. I also examined who these characters were in relation to herself and what parts they played in her real life. Gabriel being the most interesting and wondered how purposefully the author chose that name. The twist was a surprise, reminded me of another book, The Shack. I also liked the idea of someone being in an entirely new environment allowing that person to discover or become something more, new, different. So I guess we have two very different perspectives. I truly enjoyed this book.

The obvious thing about this book is that the authour was pro vax, pro mask and pro mandate. Read it if you want to feel lectured and see the world of covid through CNN and MSNBC. As a healthcare professional, I found this book annoying and ridiculous. Skip it and spend your time living your life with covid as an after thought.

I loved this book! The first part of the story was a bit dreamy and the timeline seemed a little off, but it all made sense when she woke in the ICU. Patients perceive time and space differently while they are sedated and intubated. Initially, it felt jarring to make the sudden change, but that is real for patients. I found this book to be well researched and totally engaging. I did not focus on dates or details, but enjoyed the dream-like quality that was so well captured. Great story that is well told.

I thought it was poorly written, trite about a very serious thing, extremely predictable (the twist was surprising And not) too many clichés served on a platter. Just a silly book thst should have been important and well done.

I really enjoyed this book! I know we disagree on that, but, your questioning why she “dreamt” about things that hadn’t happened yet is kind of strange. The whole last third of the book is her questioning whether or not she had a “coma dream” or if she was basically living an alternate reality. So yeah, it’s crazy that she “dreamt” about the mask mandates and the Navy ship, but isn’t that the point?

I really loved the first half of the book in the Galapagos, and I didn’t expect the twist (but I’m not the type of person to be expecting twists like that…I just read and see where it takes me). I just hope she finds Gabriel in the end.

Hi Janice, always happy to hear from readers who disagree with me and are able to be friendly and constructive in doing so! Glad to hear that you enjoyed the book!

My issue with the last third of the book had to do with the fact that the events of the book include some that didn’t happen yet in real life — it seemed like perhaps some diligence in researching the dates when stuff happened would’ve made it make more sense to me.

And yes I agree an unexpected twist in a book can be really satisfying :)

I love all of Jodie’s books and I think you are being way too harsh. They are fiction after all and all writers get to take a leave from the actual truth. “ “Why spoil a good story for a modicum of truth?All of Jodie’s books are very well researched- I always learn something new. Who knew about the coma dreams? I’m a huge fan of her writing and this hasn’t disappointed.

Thanks for this review. I just finished reading it and ran to the Net to see if anyone loved it. I was surprised to see so many 5* reviews because well, I just felt manipulated. My irritation then unfortunately translated into me not caring about “what happens next”, but I finished it anyway….and was annoyed again.

Just read this book, I agree it was boring and slow paced. But I was shocked at the twist and unhappy with the ending. So many unanswered questions.

This book was horribly disappointing. I read the storyteller prior and thought that book was fantastic. Slow, but fantastic. This book is good enough until the “it was all a dream” cliche gets thrown in. After that it’s horrible. I had to force myself through the 100 pages describing how to put in a ventilator and the training manual about how to conduct a swallow test after covid. It felt like a weird attempt to insert unnecessary medical knowledge, not enhance and tell a story. Character development outside of Beatriz is weak and there’s no real emotional attachment to the main character.

I agree wholeheartedly with your review, boring, and really a stretch of the imagination. Who wants to relive the pandemic? How do you explain the ongoing progression in Covid protocols and numbers if Finn’s emails were imaginary? Then the big plot twist that makes no sense at all. I regret wasting a hour of my life on this boring book.

I loved the book & have read it twice! It kept me on the edge of my seat and had a hard time putting it down!! In the end I was hoping when she woke from her coma she would find the man she was truly falling for in Galapagos Those who didn’t like it perhaps don’t have much of an imagination we new it was fiction!

So upset that I spend over 6 hrs listening to this audiobook to find out the majority of this story was based on a lucid dream/psychosis. Even before this point I was pushing myself to get through the book bc I found it quite boring and trite. What a terrible ending and waste of time. Deleting this and not risking another credit on a Piccoult pick. Had chosen this bc I listened to Mad Honey which I thought was good, while also similar in the hidden subtext of pro-LGBTQIA. One star. Terrible.

Very poorly researched which is really disappointing for a Jodi Picoult novel. Poorly done. Slow. And the worst part is people that read this book 20 years from now will think that the “facts” in the book are accurate.

I do find a lot of her books boring but the thing that bothered me right away was that she blatantly used Yoko as her client. Could t she have created a character just as intriguing without copying their life, death, home, etc. it disturbed me since I remember that all so well and distracted me from the get go.

So happy to have found your review! I usually read a book in about a week and this one took me TWO MONTHS. I also always love Jodi but this one was weird and slow. All I could find were positive reviews and I was starting to think I was nuts!

Wish You Were Here — Jodi Picoult (Book Review)

by Barbara the Bibliophage | Nov 10, 2021 | RELAX: Other Relaxation | 0 comments

Wish You Were Here , to be released in late November by Jodi Picoult, is a pandemic novel. But it’s also so much more. It’s about the necessity of malleable hopes and dreams, whether we want to adjust or not. It focuses on one relatively young, upwardly mobile couple living in New York City. Diana O’Toole works at Sotheby’s, the famous art auction house. And her sweetheart Finn is a surgical resident at a big NYC hospital, working his way up in the medical system. The story begins in mid-March 2020.

Knowing the time frame, you realize from the start that Diana and Finn are in for some major challenges. COVID-19 is just beginning to overrun New York City and the US. And the two have a long-anticipated trip planned to the Galapagos Islands. The first struggle is what to do with the tickets since airports and borders are closing down to limit the spread of the virus.

Finn encourages Diana to take the trip, even though he’s stuck at work caring for a seemingly unending stream of patients. So she heads south, and just barely makes it to their vacation destination island. Where the story goes from there is part travelogue, part character study, and part unexpected twist. Because it comes from the mind of Jodi Picoult. The issues brought up by the twist are a reminder of the world we live in. But I’m not saying anymore because it will indeed spoil your reading experience.

My conclusions

Fundamentally, Wish You Were Here is a COVID-era story that focuses on the universal themes of love and figuring out your life’s purpose. It’s an easy read, despite all the moments of pandemic struggle that feel a bit raw. Honestly, I thought reading about COVID would feel heavy but Diana is so engaging that her story absorbed me.

I loved learning about the Galapagos Islands, from the flora to the fauna to the people living there. Despite the situation being fictional, the location is real and a common bucket-list destination. In this era, surely I’m not alone in reading about escapist locations like the Galapagos.

However, there’s a particular point in the story where Diana makes an unrealistically easy decision. After that, I had a hard time buying the book’s resolution. No matter how much I liked the characters, the pivot point was entirely too simple, especially in the time of the virus. You may feel differently, but given my own pandemic experience, this turning point rubbed me the wrong way.

Still, Picoult is a skilled writer, and Wish You Were Here is no exception to the rule. Not only does she research places, she learns about the real-life people and situations on which she bases her story. Every bit of that background shows in the depth Picoult brings to her novels.

I recommend this book if you’re interested in a journey to the not-so-distant past on a faraway island. The mix of genres, combined with engaging characters will have you devouring Wish You Were Here.

Pair with What Could Be Saved by Liese O’Halloran Schwarz. The two novels combine themes of art, exotic locations, and finding ourselves.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group / Ballantine Books, and the author for a digital advanced reader’s copy in exchange for this honest review.

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Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult Book Review

I like to kick off the beginning of each year with a review of a non-indie book. So, I scoured the bookstores for a newish release to quickly read and review. I originally found a copy of David Bell’s She’s Gone and dug in only to find that I wasn’t connecting with the story, and I was struggling to keep picking it up.

Then, I went to a local library’s Christmas book sale in mid-November and found a nice hardback copy of Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult for a mere three dollars. It wasn’t long before I tossed She’s Gone aside and crossed my fingers, hoping this one would click.

Stories about the pandemic are usually not for me. For one, it’s too soon. For another, like everyone else, I’m trying to move forward. But since this mainly seemed to be a travel story by a well-established author, I decided to give it a try, and it turned out to be the story I needed. It was a page-turner that kept me guessing at where it was going while still hitting all of the usual beats of a beach read romance.

And then, as I was in the middle of reading, a Covid and RSV outbreak ran rampant throughout my family. Soon, we were all sick, and it made the story all the more relatable on some small level. And it made me realize that this was the book that I was supposed to be reading at this exact time. Below is my review of Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult. Warning. There are spoilers ahead.

Wish You Were Here plot summary

Diana O’Toole works in the world of art sales while her boyfriend, Finn, is a surgeon at a New York City Hospital. The two have planned a two-week vacation in the Galapagos Islands in March of 2022, but when the Covid-19 pandemic breaks out, Finn encourages Diana to go on her own.

Diana does, but soon after arriving, she finds that her luggage has been lost, and the island has shut down for the next two weeks, leaving her without a place to stay or things to do. Luckily, a kind old woman who introduces herself simply as Abuela offers Diana a place to stay. Her son, Gabriel, is initially not pleased, but he soon warms to Diana as does his troubled teenage daughter, Beatriz.

As two weeks extends to an indefinite amount of time, as anyone who has lived through the recent historical event could predict, Diana spends her time hanging out with Beatriz, touring the island with Gabriel, and being fed by Abuela. With an unreliable Wi-Fi signal, Diana’s only communication with the outside world are the postcards she writes home to Finn and the flood of emails that occasionally come through her phone from him.

Finn’s emails depict a nightmarish scene at the hospital of a disease they don’t understand absolutely destroying his patients and the gory details that this entails. It helps to downplay Diana’s situation, and she grows to build a life on this island. With it, her solid, meticulously planned life that she imagined with Finn begins to waver. And when she is suddenly whisked back to reality, Diana finds herself longing for her island life.

About Diana

Diana O’Toole is a mixed bag of a person. It’s established early on that she has a strained relationship with her mother, a famous photographer who always put her work before her child. Her father, an art restorer, died suddenly a few years back and was Diana’s main support system. And she herself has found a career in the art world and was in the middle of securing a high-profile piece of art from the widow of a famous musician who was murdered over 30 years ago when the pandemic stalled everything.

She’s also the kind of person who tries to plan her life with deadlines and milestones that have no guarantees of working out, yet seem to have been heading in her desired direction. Diana is sure that Finn will propose to her on their trip, and this will lead to marriage, children, and a happily ever after that she had longed for with her own parents.

It’s hard to feel sympathy for someone who gets stranded on a tropical island during the middle of a pandemic, even if she has lost her suitcase and itinerary. But it is easy to sympathize with the loneliness and isolation. Still, the remaining islanders help her to meet her basic needs with a little begging.

Diana can be lazy, irresponsible, and hard-headed. But her flaws make her more interesting than the basic damsel in distress or strong, independent woman. She falls somewhere in between. She doesn’t let people tell her what to do, but she also tends to not fully appreciate all that people do for her.

I attempted to write this review without mentioning the twist, but the twist is what I want to talk about. I went into this book thinking that Covid was going to just be a small element of the book, the element that just gets Diana to the island by herself and causes this conflict where she is forced to choose between the life she had planned and the life that she fell into. And that’s what happens but with a new spin on this trope.

It turns out, Diana never left New York. Instead, she contracted a deadly case of Covid that required her to be on a ventilator for nearly week. And during that time, she dreamed of spending two months on the Galapagos where she grew close to Beatriz, Gabriel, and Abuela.

So, when she is suddenly pulled away from that life, she can’t accept her actual reality, particularly because of how real her time there felt. What starts as a breezy beach read grows deep and almost supernatural in a well-crafted turn of events.

We all know the stories of the ERs being packed during the pandemic and how getting attached to a ventilator became an almost guaranteed death sentence, particularly during those early days. There’s also no rhyme or reason to why the disease hit some harder than others, particularly the young and healthy.

Defying expectations

After she wakes up, Diana finds herself wandering around with a case of survivor’s guilt, a long road to recovery, and a major longing to return to the island. The research she does to find others who have experienced these lucid alternate lives after a near-death experience is a fascinating element to the story. And in the epilogue, Picoult explains that people have actually experienced these alternate lives while unconscious.

Once the twist occurred, I began to try to predict where the story was going next. Surely, Diana had been transported to some limbo state with others who were dead or dying. And she was going to find that her found family on that island were no longer alive once she researched it further.

Luckily, the story was a bit less predictable than that as the book makes a U-turn back into a standard romance book. We don’t get to see Diana reunite with Gabriel and the others and live out her happily ever after. Instead, we see her break her desire to plan her life out in advance and find a way to make peace with her past and move forward with her future. And the ending hints that she gets to where this new path is taking her.

The message

The thing is, Diana likely would have been happy had life worked out the way she had planned. She seemed to like the stability of knowing in which direction her life was going, and she felt that Finn wanted the same things, and he did.

Her life on the Galapagos was less than perfect, but it opened her up to new possibilities that she had never before considered. It made me realize that I could have kept reading She’s Gone and just grinned and bared it because I had already chosen that path. I also could have skipped reading a book about Covid as per my own personal preferences and then not had this amazing coincidence occur in which I got sick while reading a book about that very sickness.

This book sends the message that Covid showed us all in that you never know what’s around the corner. And it’s okay to pivot in life, even if your current life is going well. Because there are no deadlines, and there is no checklist to cross off. We live in a time where scary things can happen but so can great things. We’re less confined by our circumstances, and it’s never too late to start over or try something new, especially when we’ve been given a second chance.

Buy a copy of Wish You Were Here here and help support local bookstores. This is an affiliate link and I will earn a commission on any sales.

Share your comments

Loving the sounds of this read and the story of how you came to read it at just the right time!

I haven’t heard of this book before but it sounds like an interesting read. I am looking forward to reading more this year. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Lauren – bournemouthgirl

Thanks for reading!

what a fantastic concise and insightful review of “Wish You Were Here” by Jodi Picoult. The author does a great job of exploring the emotional depth of the story while providing a balanced analysis of the book’s merits. It’s a must-read for fans of Picoult’s writing and anyone looking to gain a deeper understanding of this powerful novel. I really enjoyed this book too such an interesting read !

Thanks! This book definitely stuck with me.

What a fantastic concise and insightful review of “Wish You Were Here” by Jodi Picoult. The author does a great job of exploring the emotional depth of the story while providing a balanced analysis of the book’s merits. It’s a must-read for fans of Picoult’s writing and anyone looking to gain a deeper understanding of this powerful novel. I love this book too makes for a very interesting read!

Pingback: My Top 10 Books Read in 2023 - Laura's Books and Blogs

I enjoyed this book and the message so much. It kept drawing me in. I had to finish it on Day 3. What books would you recommend reading after this one?

Thanks for reading! If you liked Wish You Were Here, I recommend Miranda Nights by Gail Ward Olmsted. You can find my review here: https://laurasbooksandblogs.com/miranda-nights-book-review-interview/

Book review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

I used to love Jodi Picoult’s books. Some felt a bit obvious or preachy, or perhaps overly spiritual but they were full of emotion yet subtly poignant. However… after some time they became a bit sameish and it felt like I was reading the same story, with different players and themes in a different setting.

Having said that I very much appreciated some of the themes she’s tackled in a nuanced way recently, such as racism in Small Great Things and women’s reproductive rights in A Spark of Light . I felt like her last book, The Book of Two Ways , was a bit of a departure and I’m afraid I put it aside, the detail of Egyptian history and language being too much for me.

Her latest, Wish You Were Here, is a difficult read to describe. You think it’s going to be one thing. But then it’s not. And for a while I really liked where it was heading. But then there’s a change of direction again. It was obviously an important book to her however and Picoult has written a note in the back describing why she felt impassioned to write it.

Book review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

Diana O'Toole is perfectly on track. She will be married by thirty, done having kids by thirty-five, and move out to the New York City suburbs, all while climbing the professional ladder in the cutthroat art auction world. She's not engaged just yet, but she knows her boyfriend Finn, a surgical resident, is about to propose - days before her thirtieth birthday. Right on time. But now she is stranded, alone on what was planned to be a romantic idyll with Finn. Unfortunately, Finn is trapped thousands of miles away, and Diana is on one of the world's most beautiful islands with no food, no luggage, and no place to stay, forced to test her personal limits to survive. Struggling to find her feet, Diana gradually connects with a local family when a teenager with a secret opens up to her. As Diana helps her fight her demons she learns more about herself, and about the islands of Galapagos, where Darwin developed his theory of evolution. The dramatic and sometimes dangerous terrain reflects Diana's own experiences, her new relationships and growing awareness that she too is evolving into someone quite different.

In places this book is again dense with detail. And about some very disparate topics. The Galapagos Islands and its history and wildlife. The artworld, including restoration and the classics. About Covid, its impacts and side effects. And finally the way the mind processes memories and what we hold onto from the past.

The book opens with us getting to know Diana and her life with Sotheby’s sourcing artwork for auction. She’s on the precipice of a life-changing deal in March 2020 when Covid first rears its ugly head.

She’s about to go to the Galapagos Islands with her surgery-registrar partner Finn, when he’s told his leave as been cancelled. He urges her however, to go without him.

Puerto Villamil closes when Diana arrives and suddenly she’s without food and accommodation. The blurb made me think she was in some danger, but really she’s just in a strange place, with no language and everything is closed. She’s taken in by an old woman, befriends a teenager and clashes with a local who dislikes tourists. She’s stuck longer than expected on the island and unable to contact Finn though receives intermittent emails from him – fraught with Covid-related news about New York and its residents.

It’s obvious from the blurb that Diana has a revelation of sorts while away from her life – the life she’s meticulously mapped out and thinks she’s wanted from a young age – but we all know that it takes a crisis for us to re-evaluate what we think is important.

And then there’s a turning point that I didn’t see coming. Though I’d be surprised if anyone does.

The book is set in the present though includes snippets and memories of Diana’s past. She was close to her art restorer father, while her mother (a famous photographer) was predominantly absent from Diana’s childhood. They’ve never been close but recently Diana’s had to arrange care for her mother who has early onset Alzheimers.

In the note to readers, Picoult talks about churning this out quickly during 2020. Picoult’s obviously done significant amounts of research into Covid and its treatment, and is intrigued by the experiences of Covid patients who’ve survived – particularly those on ventilators as well as the aftermath of their experience and their recovery.

In many ways for me this book cycled through a number of stages: initially focussing on Diana and her backstory and the life she’s planned; to some commentary about Covid and its impact – not just on our characters, but on society; before circling back to Diana again.

Weirdly as I’m writing this I’ve upgraded it from a 3.5 star read to a 4 star read. It was certainly a 4 star read for most of this book but I wasn’t too sure about the direction it took towards the end. Perhaps – in retrospect – I was being a bit judgemental, so I’ll chastise myself for that and bump the score up again.

Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult was published in Australia by Allen & Unwin and is now available.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.

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Book Club Questions for Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

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Book club questions for Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult examines all the key developments in this impactful read about resilience among a life-changing crisis. There will be spoilers so for more context about the story, check out my spoiler-free review first .

Wow, this book. It’s one of those that will truly stick with me for a long time. Jodi Picoult is such a prolific writer—she’s so talented and her books just have that quality that are everlasting.

I mentioned this in my review, but I felt the initial novels focused on covid-19 really needed to be handled in a more particular way. While there is a retrospect component since we are about to enter two years of the first documented case in the U.S., at the same time, the pandemic is still ongoing as of today (hopefully 2022 will be different).

I mentioned that because I was quite hesitant when I realized now is the time for fiction that features the pandemic. I just hoped that these authors would really work to paint an image of how we all felt back in March 2020. And of course, Jodi more than delivered. I truly believed she put so much thought and care in how she presented this story.

And I did not see that twist coming at all!!! Oh my gosh, my jaw dropped.

The Synopsis

Book Club Questions for Wish You Were Here

First, let’s talk about when we first meet Diana. Why did she feel it was necessary to have such a detailed plan for her life?
While this is a fiction story, it takes place during our very real March 2020 when everything changes. Do you remember what you were doing when the world shut down due to covid-19? How did you feel reading about the early days of the pandemic in this story?
Finn is needed at the hospital but he tells Diana to go ahead and enjoy the Galápagos Islands. At the time, we believe that Diana does actually go there. If you were in Diana’s shoes, would you have gone or would you have stayed home?
While Finn is seeing all kinds of horrors, Diana is exploring Isabela Island and developing a relationship with both a teenager named Beatriz and her father Gabriel. Before we get into the big twists, what was your impression of the romance between Diana and Gabriel?
And suddenly everything changes in this story and we learn that Diana has covid and has been on a ventilator this entire time. The story goes from a love triangle romance to a very realistic and scary situation. What were your initial thoughts as you read this unfold? Looking back, did you catch any hints that Diana’s trip was not what it seemed?
Diana eventually learns that people on ventilators can experience lucid dreams that feel so real. But like Diana, many are still convinced it truly happened and in a sense they’re almost living a double life. Why do you think the mind goes to these unconscious but vivid experiences?
What was the deeper meaning behind Diana’s ‘trip’ to the Galápagos—was it a way of telling herself to change the direction of her life?
OK, so now let’s get back to the relationships in the story. Why weren’t Finn and Diana a fit in the end?
A significant part of the story is Diana’s tense relationship with her absent mother. Diana felt abandoned by her mother—how did this impact how she approached both her relationships and career?
Let’s talk about the closure she got with her mother before she passed away.
Why was art therapy the right avenue for Diana in the end?
In the epilogue, Diana finally goes to Isabela Island and it’s different in many ways from what she dreamed. Why was it important for her to visit there?
The story ends in a somewhat similar way to how it started where Diana falls in a tortoise breeding ground and is rescued. Is Gabriel the one to catch her at the end? If he does exist, what does this mean about Diana’s lucid dream? Or do you believe is it someone else completely?
Netflix will adapt the novel into a feature film . What elements from the novel do you hope are included? Who should they cast for the main characters?
In the author’s note, Jodi talks about some of the main lessons learned from the pandemic. What have you personally learned? Did it cause you to make any life changes?

Additional Recommendations

Hope you enjoyed book club questions for Wish You Were Here ! Here are some more recommendations along with links to book club questions.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Another novel that explores choices and fate is The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. This is one of my favorites of the past couple years.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

In The Midnight Library , Matt Haig’s enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

You can order the book on Amazon here . Check out my book club questions here .

The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

If you haven’t read Jodi’s novel from last year, The Book of Two Ways . I highly recommend it! The ending definitely got people talking.

Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She’s on a plane when the flight attendant makes an announcement: Prepare for a crash landing. She braces herself as thoughts flash through her mind. The shocking thing is, the thoughts are not of her husband but of a man she last saw fifteen years ago: Wyatt Armstrong.

Dawn, miraculously, survives the crash, but so do all the doubts that have suddenly been raised. She has led a good life. Back in Boston, there is her husband, Brian, their beloved daughter, and her work as a death doula, in which she helps ease the transition between life and death for her clients.

But somewhere in Egypt is Wyatt Armstrong, who works as an archaeologist unearthing ancient burial sites, a career Dawn once studied for but was forced to abandon when life suddenly intervened. And now, when it seems that fate is offering her second chances, she is not as sure of the choice she once made.

After the crash landing, the airline ensures that the survivors are seen by a doctor, then offers transportation to wherever they want to go. The obvious destination is to fly home, but she could take another path: return to the archaeological site she left years before, reconnect with Wyatt and their unresolved history, and maybe even complete her research on The Book of Two Ways—the first known map of the afterlife.

As the story unfolds, Dawn’s two possible futures unspool side by side, as do the secrets and doubts long buried with them. Dawn must confront the questions she’s never truly asked: What does a life well lived look like? When we leave this earth, what do we leave behind? Do we make choices . . . or do our choices make us? And who would you be if you hadn’t turned out to be the person you are right now?

Happy reading!

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March 13, 2020

When I was six years old, I painted a corner of the sky. My father was working as a conservator, one of a handful restoring the zodiac ceiling on the main hall of Grand Central Terminal—an aqua sky strung with shimmering constellations. It was late, way past my bedtime, but my father took me to work because my mother—as usual—was not home.

He helped me carefully climb the scaffolding, where I watched him working on a cleaned patch of the turquoise paint. I looked at the stars representing the smear of the Milky Way, the golden wings of Pegasus, Orion’s raised club, the twisted fish of Pisces. The original mural had been painted in 1913, my father told me. Roof leaks damaged the plaster, and in 1944, it had been replicated on panels that were attached to the arched ceiling. The original plan had been to remove the boards for restoration, but they contained asbestos, and so the conservators left them in place, and went to work with cotton swabs and cleaning solution, erasing decades of pollutants.

They uncovered history. Signatures and inside jokes and notes left behind by the original artists were revealed, tucked in among the constellations. There were dates commemorating weddings, and the end of World War II. There were names of soldiers. The birth of twins was recorded near Gemini.

An error had been made by the original artists, so that the painted zodiac was reversed from the way it would appear in the night sky. Instead of correcting it, though, my father was diligently reinforcing the error. That night, he was working on a small square of space, gilding stars. He had already painted over the tiny yellow dots with adhesive. He covered these with a piece of gold leaf, light as breath. Then he turned to me. “Diana,” he said, holding out his hand, and I climbed up in front of him, caged by the safety of his body. He handed me a brush to sweep over the foil, fixing it in place. He showed me how to gently rub at it with my thumb, so that the galaxy he’d created was all that remained.

When all the work was finished, the conservators kept a small dark spot in the northwest corner of Grand Central Terminal, where the pale blue ceiling meets the marble wall. This nine-by-five-inch section was left that way intentionally. My father told me that conservators do that, in case historians need to study the original composition. The only way you can tell how far you’ve come is to know where you started.

Every time I’m in Grand Central Terminal, I think about my father. Of how we left that night, hand in hand, our palms glittering like we had stolen the stars.

It is Friday the thirteenth, so I should know better. Getting from Sotheby’s, on the Upper East Side, to the Ansonia, on the Upper West Side, means taking the Q train to Times Square and then the 1 uptown, so I have to travel in the wrong direction before I start going in the right one.

I hate going backward.

Normally I would walk across Central Park, but I am wearing a new pair of shoes that are rubbing a blister on my heel, shoes I never would have worn if I’d known that I was going to be summoned by Kitomi Ito. So instead, I find myself on public transit. But something’s off, and it takes me a moment to figure out what.

It’s quiet . Usually, I have to fight my way through tourists who are listening to someone singing for coins, or a violin quartet. Today, though, the platform is empty.

Last night Broadway theaters had shut down performances for a month, after an usher tested positive for Covid, out of an abundance of caution. That’s what Finn said, anyway—New York–Presbyterian, where he is a resident, has not seen the influx of coronavirus cases that are appearing in Washington State and Italy and France. There were only nineteen cases in the city, Finn told me last night as we watched the news, when I wondered out loud if we should start panicking yet. “Wash your hands and don’t touch your face,” he told me. “It’s going to be fine.”

The uptown subway is nearly empty, too. I get off at Seventy-second and emerge aboveground, blinking like a mole, walking at a brisk New Yorker clip. The Ansonia, in all its glory, rises up like an angry djinn, defiantly jutting its Beaux Arts chin at the sky. For a moment, I just stand on the sidewalk, looking up at its mansard roof and its lazy sprawl from Seventy-third to Seventy-fourth Street. There’s a North Face and an American Apparel at ground level, but it wasn’t always this bougie. Kitomi told me that when she and Sam Pride moved in in the seventies, the building was overrun with psychics and mediums, and housed a swingers’ club with an orgy room and an open bar and buffet. Sam and I, she said, would stop in at least once a week.

I was not alive when Sam’s band, the Nightjars, was formed by Sam and his co-songwriter, William Punt, with two school chums from Slough, England. Nor was I when their first album spent thirty weeks on the Billboard charts, or when their little British quartet went on The Ed Sullivan Show and ignited a stampede of screaming American girls. Not when Sam married Kitomi Ito ten years later or when the band broke up, months after their final album was released featuring cover art of Kitomi and Sam naked, mirroring the figures in a painting that hung behind their bed. And I wasn’t alive when Sam was murdered three years later, on the steps of this very building, stabbed in the throat by a mentally ill man who recognized him from that iconic album cover.

But like everyone else on the planet, I know the whole story.

The doorman at the Ansonia smiles politely at me; the concierge looks up as I approach. “I’m here to see Kitomi Ito,” I say coolly, pushing my license across the desk to her.

“She’s expecting you,” the concierge answers. “Floor—”

“Eighteen. I know.”

Lots of celebrities have lived at the Ansonia—from Babe Ruth to Theodore Dreiser to Toscanini to Natalie Portman—but arguably, Kitomi and Sam Pride are the most famous. If my husband had been murdered on the front steps of my apartment building, I might not have stayed for another thirty years, but that’s just me. And anyway, Kitomi is finally moving now, which is why the world’s most infamous rock widow has my number in her cellphone.

What is my life, I think, as I lean against the back wall of the elevator.

When I was young, and people asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I had a whole plan. I wanted to be securely on a path to my career, to get married by thirty, to finish having kids by thirty-five. I wanted to speak fluent French and have traveled cross-country on Route 66. My father had laughed at my checklist. You, he told me, are definitely your mother’s daughter .

I did not take that as a compliment.

Also, for the record, I’m perfectly on track. I am an associate specialist at Sotheby’s— Sotheby’s! —and Eva, my boss, has hinted in all ways possible that after the auction of Kitomi’s painting I will likely be promoted. I am not engaged, but when I ran out of clean socks last weekend and went to scrounge for a pair of Finn’s, I found a ring hidden in the back of his underwear drawer. We leave tomorrow on vacation and Finn’s going to pop the question there. I’m so sure of it that I got a manicure today instead of eating lunch.

And I’m twenty-nine.

The door to the elevator opens directly into Kitomi’s foyer, all black and white marble squares like a giant chessboard. She comes into the entryway, dressed in jeans and combat boots and a pink silk bathrobe, with a thatch of white hair and the purple heart-shaped spectacles for which she is known. She has always reminded me of a wren, light and hollow-boned. I think of how Kitomi’s black hair went white overnight with grief after Sam was murdered. I think of the photographs of her on the sidewalk, gasping for air.

“Diana!” she says, as if we are old friends.

There is a brief awkwardness as I instinctively put my hand out to take hers and then remember that is not a thing we are doing anymore and instead just give a weird little wave. “Hi, Kitomi,” I say.

“I’m so glad you could come today.”

“It’s not a problem. There are a lot of sellers who want to make sure the paperwork is handed over personally.”

Over her shoulder, at the end of a long hallway, I can see it—the Toulouse-Lautrec painting that is the entire reason I know Kitomi Ito. She sees my eyes dart toward it and her mouth tugs into a smile.

“I can’t help it,” I say. “I never get tired of seeing it.”

A strange flicker crosses Kitomi’s face. “Then let’s get you a better view,” she replies, and she leads me deeper into her home.

From 1892 to 1895, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec scandalized the impressionist art world by moving into a brothel and painting prostitutes together in bed. Le Lit, one of the most famous in that series, is at the Musée d’Orsay. Others have been sold to private collections for ten million and twelve million dollars. The painting in Kitomi’s house is clearly part of the series and yet patently set apart from the others.

There are not two women in this one, but a woman and a man. The woman sits propped up naked against the headboard, the sheet fallen to her waist. Behind the headboard is a mirror, and in it you can see the reflection of the second figure in the painting—Toulouse-Lautrec himself, seated naked at the foot of the bed with sheets pooled in his lap, his back to the viewer as he stares as intently at the woman as she is staring at him. It’s intimate and voyeuristic, simultaneously private and public.

When the Nightjars released their final album, Twelfth of Never, the cover art had Kitomi bare-breasted against their headboard, gazing at Sam, whose broad back forms the lower third of the visual field. Behind their bed hangs the painting they’re emulating, in the position the mirror holds in the actual art.

Everyone knows that album cover. Everyone knows that Sam bought this painting for Kitomi from a private collection, as a wedding gift.

But only a handful of people know that she is now selling it, at a unique Sotheby’s auction, and that I’m the one who closed that deal.

“Are you still going on vacation?” Kitomi asks, disrupting my reverie.

Did I tell her about our trip? Maybe. But I cannot think of any logical reason she would care.

Clearing my throat (I don’t get paid to moon over art, I get paid to transact it), I paste a smile on my face. “Only for two weeks, and then the minute I get back, it’s full steam ahead for your auction.” My job is a strange one—I have to convince clients to give their beloved art up for adoption, which is a careful dance between rhapsodizing over the piece and encouraging them that they are doing the right thing by selling it. “If you’re having any anxiety about the transfer of the painting to our offices, don’t,” I tell her. “I promise that I will personally be here overseeing the crating, and I’ll be there on the other end, too.” I glance back at the canvas. “We’re going to find this the perfect home,” I vow. “So. The paperwork?”

Kitomi glances out the window before turning back to me. “About that,” she says.

“What do you mean, she doesn’t want to sell?” Eva says, looking at me over the rims of her famous horn-rimmed glasses. Eva St. Clerck is my boss, my mentor, and a legend. As the head of sale for the Imp Mod auction—the giant sale of impressionist and modern art—she is who I’d like to be by the time I’m forty, and until this moment, I had firmly enjoyed being teacher’s pet, tucked under the wing of her expertise.

Eva narrows her eyes. “I knew it. Someone from Christie’s got to her.”

In the past, Kitomi has sold other pieces of art with Christie’s, the main competitor of Sotheby’s. To be fair, everyone assumed that was how she’d sell the Toulouse-Lautrec, too . . . until I did something I never should have done as an associate specialist, and convinced her otherwise.

“It’s not Christie’s—”

“Phillips?” Eva asks, her eyebrows arching.

“No. None of them. She just wants to take a pause,” I clarify. “She’s concerned about the virus.”

“Why?” Eva asks, dumbfounded. “It’s not like a painting can catch it.”

“No, but buyers can at an auction.”

“Well, I can talk her down from that ledge,” Eva says. “We’ve got firm interest from the Clooneys and Beyoncé and Jay-Z, for God’s sake.”

“Kitomi’s also nervous because the stock market’s tanking. She thinks things are going to get worse, fast. And she wants to wait it out a bit . . . be safe not sorry.”

Eva rubs her temples. “You do realize we’ve already leaked this sale,” she says. “ The New Yorker literally did a feature on it.”

“She just needs a little more time,” I say.

Eva glances away, already dismissing me in her mind. “You can go,” she orders.

I step out of her office and into the maze of hallways, lined with the books that I’ve used to research art. I’ve been at Sotheby’s for six and a half years—seven if you count the internship I did when I was still at Williams College. I went straight from undergrad into their master’s program in art business. I started out as a graduate trainee, then became a junior cataloger in the Impressionist Department, doing initial research for incoming paintings. I would study what else the artist was working on around the same time and how much similar works sold for, sometimes writing up the first draft of the catalog blurb. Though the rest of the world is digital these days, the art world still produces physical catalogs that are beautiful and glossy and nuanced and very, very important. Now, as an associate specialist,

I perform other tasks for Eva: visiting the artwork in situ and noting any imperfections, the same way you look over a rental car for dings before you sign the contract; physically accompanying the painting as it is packed up and moved from a home to our office; and occasionally joining my boss for meetings with potential clients.

A hand snakes out of a doorway I am passing and grabs my shoulder, pulling me into a little side room. “Jesus,” I say, nearly falling into Rodney—my best friend here at Sotheby’s. Like me, he started as a college intern. Unlike me, he did not wind up going into the business side of the auction house. Instead, he designs and helps create the spaces where the art is showcased for auction.

“Is it true?” Rodney asks. “Did you lose the Nightjars’ painting?”

“First, it’s not the Nightjars’ painting. It’s Kitomi Ito’s. Second, how the hell did you find out so fast?”

“Honey, rumor is the lifeblood of this entire industry,” Rodney says. “And it spreads through these halls faster than the flu.” He hesitates. “Or coronavirus, as it may be.”

“Well, I didn’t lose the Toulouse-Lautrec. Kitomi just wants things to settle down first.”

Rodney folds his arms. “You think that’s happening anytime soon? The mayor declared a state of emergency yesterday.”

“Finn said there are only nineteen cases in the city,” I tell him.

Rodney looks at me like I’ve just said I still believe in Santa, with a mixture of disbelief and pity. “You can have one of my rolls of toilet paper,” he says.

For the first time, I look behind him. There are six different shades of gold paint rolled onto the walls. “Which do you like?” he asks.

I point to one stripe in the middle. “Really?” he says, squinting.

“What’s it for?”

“A display of medieval manuscripts. Private sale.”

“Then that one,” I say, nodding at the stripe beside it. Which looks exactly the same. “Come up to Sant Ambroeus with me,” I beg. It’s the café at the top of Sotheby’s, and there is a prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich there that might erase the look on Eva’s face from my mind.

“Can’t. It’s popcorn for me today.”

The break room has free microwave popcorn, and on busy days, that’s lunch. “Rodney,” I hear myself say, “I’m screwed.”

He settles his hands on my shoulders, spinning me and walking me toward the opposite wall, where a mirrored panel is left over from the previous installation. “What do you see?”

I look at my hair, which has always been too red for my taste, and my eyes, steel blue. My lipstick has worn off. My skin is a ghostly winter white. And there’s a weird stain on the collar of my blouse. “I see someone who can kiss her promotion goodbye.”

“Funny,” Rodney says, “because I see someone who is going on vacation tomorrow and who should have zero fucks left to give about Kitomi Ito or Eva St. Clerck or Sotheby’s. Think about tropical drinks and paradise and playing doctor with your boyfriend—”

“Real doctors don’t do that—”

“—and snorkeling with Gila monsters—”

“Marine iguanas.”

“Whatever.” Rodney squeezes me from behind, meeting my gaze in the mirror. “Diana, by the time you get back here in two weeks, everyone will have moved on to another scandal.” He smirks at me. “Now go buy some SPF 50 and get out of here.”

I laugh as Rodney picks up a paint roller and smoothly covers all the gold stripes with the one I picked. Once, he told me that an auction house wall can have a foot of paint on it, because they are repainted constantly.

As I close the door behind me, I wonder what color this room first was, and if anyone here even remembers.

To get to Hastings-on-Hudson, a commuter town north of the city, you can take Metro-North from Grand Central. So for the second time today, I head to Midtown.

This time, though, I visit the main concourse of the building and position myself directly underneath the piece of sky I painted with my father, letting my gaze run over the backward zodiac and the freckles of stars that blush across the arch of the ceiling. Craning my neck back, I stare until I’m dizzy, until I can almost hear my father’s voice again.

It’s been four years since he died, and the only way I can garner the courage to visit my mother is to come here first, as if his memory gives me protective immunity.

I am not entirely sure why I’m going to see her. It’s not like she asked for me. And it’s not like this is part of any routine. I haven’t been to visit in three months, actually.

Maybe that’s why I’m going.

The Greens is an assisted living facility walkable from the train station in Hastings-on-Hudson—which is one of the reasons I picked it, when my mother reappeared out of the blue after years of radio silence. And, naturally, she didn’t show up oozing maternal warmth. She was a problem that needed to be solved.

The building is made out of brick and fits into a community that looks like it was cut and pasted from New England. Trees line the street, and there’s a library next door. Cobblestones arch in a widening circle from the front door. It isn’t until you are buzzed in through the locked door and see the color-coded hallways and the photographs on the residents’ apartment doors that you realize it’s a memory care facility.

I sign in and walk past a woman shuffling into the bright art room, filled with all sorts of paints and clay and crafts. As far as I know, my mother has never participated.

They do all kinds of things here to make it easier for the occupants. Doorways meant to be entered by the residents have bright yellow frames they cannot miss; rooms for staff or storage blend into the walls, painted over with murals of bookshelves or greenery. Since all the apartment doors look similar, there’s a large photo on each one that has meaning to the person who lives there: a family member, a special location, a beloved pet. In my mother’s case, it’s one of her own most famous photographs—a refugee who’s come by raft from Cuba, carrying the limp body of his dehydrated son in his arms. It’s grotesque and grim and the pain radiates from the image. In other words, exactly the kind of photo for which Hannah O’Toole was known.

There is a punch code that opens the secure unit on both sides of the door. (The keypad on the inside is always surrounded by a small zombie clot of residents trying to peer over your shoulder to see the numbers and presumably the path to freedom.) The individual rooms aren’t locked. When I let myself into my mother’s room, the space is neat and uncluttered. The television is on—the television is always on—tuned to a game show. My mother sits on the couch with her hands in her lap, like she’s at a cotillion waiting to be asked to dance.

She is younger than most of the residents here. There’s one skunk streak of white in her black hair, but it’s been there since I was little. She doesn’t really look much different from the way she did when I was a girl, except for her stillness. My mother was always in motion—talking animatedly with her hands, turning at the next question, adjusting the lens of a camera, hieing away from us to some corner of the globe to capture a revolution or a natural disaster.

Beyond her is the screened porch, the reason that I picked The Greens. I thought that someone who’d spent so much of her life outdoors would hate the confinement of a memory care facility. The screened porch was safe, because there was no egress from it, but it allowed a view. Granted, it was only a strip of lawn and beyond that a parking lot, but it was something.

It costs a shitload of money to keep my mother here. When she showed up on my doorstep, in the company of two police officers who found her wandering around Central Park in a bathrobe, I hadn’t even known she was back in the city. They found my address in her wallet, torn from the corner of an old Christmas card envelope. Ma’am, one of the officers had asked me, do you know this woman?

I recognized her, of course. But I didn’t know her at all.

When it became clear that my mother had dementia, Finn asked me what I was going to do. Nothing, I told him. She had barely been involved in taking care of me when I was young; why was I obligated to take care of her now? I remember seeing the look on his face when he realized that for me, maybe, love was a quid pro quo. I didn’t want to ever see that expression again on Finn, but I also knew my limitations, and I didn’t have the resources to become the caretaker for someone with early-onset Alzheimer’s. So I did my due diligence, talking to her neurologist and getting pamphlets from different facilities. The Greens was the best of the lot, but it was expensive. In the end, I packed up my mother’s apartment, Sotheby’s auctioned off the photographs from her walls, and the result was an annuity that could pay for her new residence.

I did not miss the irony of the fact that the parent I missed desperately was the one who was no longer in the world, while the parent I could take or leave was inextricably tied to me for the long haul.

Now, I paste a smile on my face and sit down next to my mother on the couch. I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve come to visit since installing her here, but I very clearly remember the directions of the staff: act like she knows you, and even if she doesn’t remember, she will likely follow the social cues and treat you like a friend. The first time I’d come, when she asked who I was and I said Your daughter, she had become so agitated that she’d bolted away, fallen over a chair, and cut her forehead.

“Who’s winning Wheel of Fortune ?” I ask, settling in as if I’m a regular visitor.

Her eyes dart toward me. There’s a flicker of confusion, like a sputtering pilot light, before she smooths it away. “The lady in the pink shirt,” my mother says. Her brows draw together, as she tries to place me. “Are you—”

“The last time I was here, it was warm outside,” I interrupt, offering the clue that this isn’t the first time I’ve visited. “It’s pretty warm out today. Should we open the slider?”

She nods, and I walk toward the entrance to the screened porch. The latch that locks it from the inside is open. “You’re supposed to keep this fastened,” I remind her. I don’t have to worry about her wandering off—but it still makes me nervous to have the sliding door unlocked.

“Are we going somewhere?” she asks, when a gust of fresh air blows into the living room.

“Not today,” I tell her. “But I’m taking a trip tomorrow. To the Galápagos.”

“I’ve been there,” my mother says, lighting up as a thread of memory catches. “There’s a tortoise. Lonesome George. He’s the last of his whole species. Imagine being the last of anything in the whole world.”

For some reason, my throat thickens with tears. “He died,” I say.

My mother tilts her head. “Who?”

“Lonesome George.”

“Who’s George?” she asks, and she narrows her eyes. “Who are you ?”

That sentence, it wounds me.

I don’t know why it hurts so much when my mother forgets me these days, though, when she never actually knew me at all.

When Finn comes home from the hospital, I am in bed under the covers wearing my favorite flannel shirt and sweatpants, with my laptop balanced on my legs. Today has just flattened me. Finn sits down beside me, leaning against the headboard. His golden hair is wet, which means he’s showered before coming home from New York–Presbyterian, where he is a resident in the surgery department, but he’s wearing scrubs that show off the curves of his biceps and the constellation of freckles on his arms. He glances at the screen, and then at the empty pint of ice cream nestled beside me. “Wow,” he says. “ Out of Africa . . . and butter pecan? That’s, like, the big guns.”

I lean my head on his shoulder. “I had the shittiest day.”

“No, I did,” Finn replies.

“I lost a painting,” I tell him.

“I lost a patient.”

I groan. “You win. You always win. No one ever dies of an art emergency.”

“No, I mean I lost a patient. Elderly woman with LBD wandered off before I could get her in for gallbladder surgery.”

“Little black dress?”

A smile tugs at Finn’s mouth. “Lewy body dementia.”

This makes me think, naturally, of my mother.

“Did you find her?”

“Security did,” Finn says. “She was on the labor and delivery floor.”

I wonder what it was that made her go there— some internal GPS error, or the kite tail of a memory so far in the clouds you can barely see it.

“Then I do win,” I say, and I give him an abbreviated version of my meeting with Kitomi Ito.

“Okay,” Finn says, “in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a disaster. You can still get promoted to specialist, when she eventually decides to sell.”

What I love most about Finn (well, all right, one of the things I love most about Finn) is that he understands that I have a detailed design for my future. He does, too, for his own. Most important, mine and his overlap: successful careers, then two kids, then a restored farmhouse upstate. An Audi TT. A purebred English springer spaniel, but also a rescued mutt. A period where we live abroad for six months. A bank account with enough padding that we don’t have to worry if we need to get snow tires or pay for a new roof. A position on a board at a homeless shelter or a hospital or cancer charity, that in some way makes the world a better place. An accomplishment that makes someone remember my name.

(I had thought that Kitomi Ito’s auction might do that.)

If marriage is a yoke meant to keep two people moving in tandem, then my parents were oxen who each pulled in a different direction, and I was caught squarely in the middle. I never understood how you could march down an aisle with someone and not realize that you want totally different futures. My father dreamed of a family; to him art was a means of providing for me. My mother dreamed of art; to her a family was a distraction. I am all for love. But there is no passion so consuming that it can bridge a gap like that.

Life happens when you least expect it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a blueprint in your back pocket. To that end, while a good number of our friends are still racking up expensive degrees or swiping left or figuring out what sparks joy, Finn and I have plans . But we don’t only have the same general timeline for our lives, we also have the same dreams, as if we’re dipping into the same bucket list: Run a marathon. Know how to tell a good cabernet from a bad one. Watch every film in the IMDb top 250. Volunteer at the Iditarod. Hike part of the Appalachian Trail. See tulip fields in the Netherlands. Learn how to surf. See the northern lights. Retire by age fifty. Visit every UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We’re starting with the Galápagos. It’s a hellishly expensive trip for two millennials in New York; the cost of the flights alone is exorbitant. But we’ve been saving up for four years, and thanks to a deal I found online, we managed to fit a trip into our budget—one that has us based on a single island, rather than the more expensive island-hopping cruises.

And somewhere on a lava-sand beach, Finn will drop to one knee and I will fall into the ocean of his eyes and say yes, let’s start the rest of our lives .

Although I have a schedule for my life that I have not deviated from, I’m treading water, waiting for the next milestone. I have a job, but not a promotion. I have a boyfriend, but not a family. It’s like when Finn is playing one of his videogames and he can’t quite level up. I’ve visualized, I’ve manifested, I’ve tried to speak it into the universe. Finn is right. I will not let a little hiccup like Kitomi’s uncertainty derail me.

Derail us .

Finn kisses the top of my head. “I’m sorry you lost your painting.”

“I’m sorry you lost your patient.”

He has been idly tangling his fingers with mine. “She was coughing,” he murmurs.

“I thought she was there for her gallbladder.”

“She was. But she was coughing. Everyone could hear it. And I . . .” He looks up at me, ashamed. “I was scared.”

I squeeze Finn’s hand. “You thought she had Covid?”

“Yeah.” He shakes his head. “So instead of going into her room, I checked on two other patients first. And I guess she got sick of waiting . . . and walked off.” He grimaces. “She has a smoker’s cough, and a gallbladder that needs to be removed, and instead of thinking of her health I was thinking of mine.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that.”

“Can’t I? I took an oath. It’s like being a fireman and saying it’s too hot to go into a burning building.”

“I thought there were only nineteen cases in the city.”

“Today,” Finn stresses. “But my attending put the fear of God into us, saying that the emergency department will be swamped by Monday. I spent an hour memorizing how to put on PPE properly.”

“Thank God we’re going on vacation,” I say. “I feel like we both need the break.”

Finn doesn’t answer.

“I can’t wait till we’re on a beach and everything feels a million miles away.”

“Finn,” I say.

He pulls away so that he can look me in the eye. “Diana,” he says, “you should still go.”

That night, after Finn has fallen into a restless sleep, I wake up with a headache. After I find some aspirin, I slip into the living room and open my laptop. Finn’s attending at the hospital made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that taking time off at this moment would be greatly discouraged. That they were going to need all hands on deck, immediately.

It’s not that I don’t believe him, but I think of the deserted train station, and it doesn’t make sense. If anything, the city looks empty—not full of sick people.

My eyes jump from headline to headline: State of emergency declared by de Blasio.

The mayor expects a thousand cases in New York City by next week.

The NBA and NHL have canceled their seasons.

The Met has closed to all in-person visits.

Outside, the horizon is starting to blush. I can hear the rumble of a car. It feels like an ordinary Saturday in the city. Except, apparently, we are standing in the eye of the storm.

Once when I was small my father and I went with my mother to shoot pictures of the drought in the Midwest, and we got caught in a tornado. The sky had gone yellow, like an old bruise, and we took refuge in the basement of the B&B, pressed up against boxes marked as Christmas decorations and table linens. My mother had stayed on ground level with her camera. When the wind stopped shrieking and she stepped outside, I followed. She didn’t seem surprised to see me there.

There was no sound—no humans, no cars, and oddly, not a single bird or insect. It was like we stood beneath a bell jar.

Is it over? I asked.

Yes, she said. And no.

Now, I don’t realize Finn is standing behind me until I feel his hands on my shoulders. “It’s better this way,” he says.

“To go on vacation by myself?”

“For you to be in a place where I won’t worry about you,” Finn says. “I don’t know what I might wind up bringing home from the hospital. I don’t even know if I’ll be coming home from the hospital.”

“They keep saying it’ll be over in two weeks.” They, I think. The news anchors, who are parroting the press secretary, who is parroting the president.

“Yeah, I know. But that’s not what my attending’s saying.”

I think about the subway station today. About Times Square, devoid of tourists. I’m not supposed to hoard Lysol or buy N95 masks. I’ve seen the numbers in France, in Italy, but those casualties were the elderly. I’m all for taking precautions, but I also know I am young and healthy. It is hard to know what to believe. Whom to believe.

If the pandemic still feels distant from Manhattan, it will probably seem nonexistent on an archipelago in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

“What if you run out of toilet paper?” I say.

I can hear the smile in his voice. “ That’s what you’re worried about?” He squeezes my shoulders. “I promise I will steal rolls from the hospital if fights start breaking out in the bodegas.”

It feels wrong, so wrong, to go without Finn; it feels even more wrong to think about bringing a friend along as a substitute—not that I know anyone who could leave for two weeks with zero advance notice anyway. But there is also a practicality to his suggestion that sinks its claws into me. I already have the vacation time blocked off. I know we can get a credit on Finn’s airfare, but the fine print on our amazing travel deal was no refunds, period. I tell myself that it would be stupid to lose that much money, especially when the thought of showing up for work on Monday makes my head throb harder. I think of Rodney telling me to snorkel with the iguanas.

“I’ll send pictures,” I vow. “So many you’ll have to get a better data plan.”

Finn bends down until I can feel his lips in the curve of my neck. “Have enough fun for both of us,” he says.

Suddenly I am gripped by a fear so strong that it propels me out of my chair and into Finn’s arms. “You’ll be here, when I get back,” I state, because I cannot bear the thought of that sentence being a question.

“Diana,” he says, smiling. “You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”

I honestly do not remember getting to the Galápagos.

I have the Ambien to blame for that, I suppose. I took it as soon as I got on the flight. I remember packing, and how at the last minute I took my guidebooks out of my carry-on and put them in my luggage. I remember checking three times that I had my passport. I remember Finn getting paged back to the hospital, and how he kissed me goodbye and said, “Victoria Falls.”

“You’ve already forgotten my name,” I joked.

“No, that’s the next UNESCO site we visit. Except, for that one, I go to Zimbabwe and you stay here. Fair’s fair.”

“Deal,” I promised, because I knew he wouldn’t leave me behind.

After that it is all bits and pieces: the crazy bustle of the airport, as if it is holiday season and not a random weekend in March; the bottle of water I buy and finish on the flight and the People magazine I never crack open; the jolt of the wheels that whips me out of a dream state full of facts I’d read about my destination. Still logy, I stumble through the unfamiliar airport in Guayaquil, where I will stay one night on mainland Ecuador before my connecting flight to the Galápagos.

I remember only two things about landing: that the airline has lost my luggage, and that someone checks my temperature before letting me into Ecuador.

I don’t have enough Spanish or bandwidth to explain that my flight for the islands leaves early tomorrow, but surely this has happened before. I fill out a report at baggage claim, but based on the number of people who are doing the same thing, I don’t have high hopes for being reunited with my bag in time. Wistfully I think of the guidebooks I packed in there. Well, that’s all right. I’ll be discovering places firsthand; I don’t need to read about them anymore. I have the essentials in my tote—toothpaste and toothbrush, phone charger, a bathing suit I packed in case this very thing happened. I’ll come back to the airport in the morning and fly to Baltra on Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos, then take a bus to the ferry to Isabela Island, where I’ll stay for two weeks. Hopefully my bag will catch up with me at some point.

After I shower, I braid my hair, connect to the shitty hotel Wi-Fi, and try to FaceTime Finn. He doesn’t answer, and then a few minutes later, my phone starts to ring. When his face swims onto the screen, it is hidden behind a face shield, and he’s wearing a surgical mask. “You made it,” he says.

“I did,” I tell him. “My suitcase, though, wasn’t as lucky.”

“Wow. You mean, not only did I give up a vacation in paradise . . . I also gave up a vacation where you’ll be walking around naked?”

I smile. “I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that.” Suddenly I feel very tired, and very isolated. “I miss you,” I say.

The sound of an ambulance siren swells through the speaker. Finn’s eyes cut to the left. “I have to go.”

“Are you seeing it yet?” I ask. “The virus?”

His eyes meet mine, and behind the Plexiglas shield I notice the faint circles underneath them. It’s ten p.m. While I’ve been asleep on a plane, I realize, Finn has not left the hospital for twelve hours. “It’s all I’m seeing,” he says, and then the line goes dead.

The next morning, my flight to Santa Cruz goes off without a hitch. But there is a sea lion between me and the ferry to my final destination.

It sprawls across the dock in the sunshine, a slug of muscle, whiskers twitching. I edge closer toward it with my camera, thinking I can send a picture to Finn, but the minute I’m within striking distance its head and shoulders swoop upward and its eyes fix on me.

I run, leaping over its tail as it lets out a yawp and a roar, and I nearly drop my phone.

My heart’s still pounding when I reach the boat. I glance over my shoulder, certain that the beast is right on my heels, but the sea lion is immobile again, splayed on the bleached boardwalk like a lazy dog.

There are only two ferries a day to Isabela Island, but the afternoon trip isn’t as crowded as I expect it to be. In fact, there’s only me and two other passengers. In broken Spanish, I ask the man who helps me board if I am on the right boat, and get a sharp nod. I take a seat outside. And then, suddenly, we’re afloat and Santa Cruz Island starts to get smaller and smaller.

The Galápagos are a collection of islands flung into the ocean like a handful of gems on velvet. They look, I imagine, the way the world did when it was newly born—mountains too fresh to gentle into slopes, mist spitting in valleys, volcanoes unraveling the seam of the sky. Some are still spiky with lava. Some are surrounded by water that’s a dozy turquoise, some by a dramatic froth of waves. Some, like Isabela, are inhabited. Others are accessible solely by boat, and home only to the bizarre collection of creatures that have evolved there.

For two hours on the ferry I am sprayed, jerked, and yanked through choppy waters. One of the passengers, who looks to be a college kid backpacking around, is an unsettling shade of green. The other is a girl with the smooth brown skin of a local. She seems young—maybe twelve or thirteen?—and she is wearing a school uniform: a knit polo shirt with a school crest embroidered over the heart and a pair of black pants. In spite of the heat, she is also sporting a long-sleeved sweatshirt. Her shoulders are hunched, arms clutching a duffel; her eyes are red. Everything about her says: Leave me alone .

I keep my eyes on the horizon of the water and try not to throw up. I mentally compose a text to Finn: Remember the time we took the ferry from Bar Harbor to Nova Scotia for your roommate’s wedding and everyone on board got sick?

The ferry does not, as it turns out, go all the way to Isabela. It stops at a mooring, and then the backpacker, the girl, and I share a water taxi the final leg of the journey—a short distance to Puerto Villamil. I am squinting at the sugar-sand beach and palm trees when the backpacker beside me laughs with delight. “Dude!” he says. He grabs my sleeve and points. Swimming beside the boat is a tiny penguin.

As we get closer, the mass of land differentiates into individual sensations: hot gusts of wind and hooting pelicans; a man climbing a coconut tree and tossing the nuts down to a boy; a marine iguana, blinking its yellow dinosaur eye. Sidling up to the dock, I think that this could not be any more different from New York City. It feels tropical and timeless, lazy, remote. It feels like a place where no one has ever heard of a pandemic.

But then I realize that there is a horde of people waiting to secure the services of the water taxi. They have the sunburned look of tourists who are already refitting themselves into the mindset of home, shoving and yelling over each other. One man holds out a fistful of cash, waving it at our driver, who looks overwhelmed. “What’s going on?” I ask.

“La isla está cerrando,” he says.

Cerrando, I think, rummaging through my limited Spanish vocabulary.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

The young girl is silent, staring at the dock ahead. The backpacker looks at me, and then at the crowd. He speaks in Spanish to our taxi driver, who responds in a stream of words I don’t know.

“The island’s closing,” he says.

How does an island close ?

“They’re locking down for two weeks,” the boy continues. “Because of the virus.” He nods at all the people waiting on the dock. “They’re all trying to get back to Santa Cruz.”

The girl shuts her eyes, as if she doesn’t want to see any of them.

I can’t imagine how all these people are going to fit on the small ferry. The taxi driver asks a question in Spanish.

“He wants to know if we want to go back,” the boy says, glancing in the direction of the ferry, still moored a distance away. “That’s the last boat off-island.”

I do not like it when plans change.

I think of Finn, telling me to leave New York City. I think of the paid-in-full room waiting for me within walking distance of these docks. If the island is locking down for two weeks, then they must be assuming that’s how long it will take for the virus to be controlled. I could spend those two weeks fighting with this angry mob to get a seat on a flight back to New York, and hole up in our apartment while Finn works.

The boy tells the driver something in Spanish, then turns to me. “I told him you’ll probably want to go back.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Because you look like someone who plays it safe.”

Something about that smarts. Just because there’s a small glitch doesn’t mean I can’t adapt. “Well, actually, you’re wrong. I’m staying.”

The backpacker’s brows rise. “For real? Shit,” he says, with grudging admiration.

“Well, what are you going to do?” I ask the kid.

“Go back,” he says. “I’ve already been in the Galápagos for a week.”

“I haven’t,” I reply, as if I need an excuse.

“Suit yourself,” he says.

Two minutes later, the girl and I get off the water taxi onto Isabela Island. The knot of anxious travelers parts and flows around us like a current as they hurry to board the small boat. I smile at the girl shyly, but she doesn’t respond. After a while I realize she isn’t by my side anymore. I glance back and see her sitting on a wooden bench near the pier, her duffel beside her, wiping tears off her face.

Just then, the water taxi pulls away from the dock.

Suddenly it hits me: in an effort to seem more chill than I actually am, I have just stranded myself on an island.

I have never really traveled on my own. When I was little I went on location with my father when he went to restore works of art—at museums in Los Angeles, Florence, Fontainebleau. When I was in college, my roommates and I spent spring break in the Bahamas. I spent one summer with friends, working in Canada. I’ve flown to Los Angeles and Seattle with Eva to schmooze potential clients and evaluate pieces of art for auction. With Finn, I’ve driven to Acadia National Park; I’ve flown to Miami for a long weekend, and I was his plus-one at a wedding in Colorado. I’ve met women who stubbornly insist on traveling by themselves to the most remote places, as if belligerent self-sufficiency is even more Instagrammable than foreign landmarks. But that’s not who I am. I like having someone share the same memories as me. I like knowing that when I turn to Finn and say, Remember that time on Cadillac Mountain . . . I do not even have to finish the sentence.

You are on an adventure, I remind myself.

After all, my mother used to do this effortlessly, in places that were far less civilized.

When I look back at the pier again, the girl is gone.

I slide my carry-on tote onto my shoulder and walk away from the docks. The town’s small buildings are jumbled like a puzzle: brick walls with a thatched roof, a brightly painted pink stucco, a wooden breezeway with a bar/restaurant sign above it. They are all different; the only thing they have in common is that the doors are firmly shut.

La isla está cerrando .

Land iguanas wriggle across the sand street, the only signs of life.

I pass a farmacia and a store and several hostales . This is the only road; it stands to figure that if I stay on it, I will find my hotel.

I keep walking until I spot the boy I saw from the boat who has been catching the coconuts. “Hola,” I say, smiling. I gesture up and down the road. “Casa del Cielo . . . ?”

There is a light thud as the man who has been in the coconut tree drops down behind me. “Casa del Cielo,” he repeats. “El hotel no está lejos, pero no están abiertos.”

I smile at him, all teeth. “Gracias,” I say, even though I have no clue what he said. I wonder what the hell I was thinking, coming to a country where I do not speak the language.

Oh. Right. I was thinking that I was coming with Finn, who does .

With a little polite wave, I continue in the direction he’s pointed. I have gone only a few hundred yards when I see a faded wooden sign, carved with the name of the hotel.

I reach the front door just as someone is exiting. She is an old woman, her face so creased with wrinkles that it looks like linen; her black eyes are bright. She calls back to someone still inside the building, who answers in Spanish. She is wearing a cotton dress with the logo of the hotel over the left breast. She smiles at me and disappears around the side of the building.

Immediately following her comes another woman—younger, with a rope of hair down her back. She is holding a set of keys, and starts locking the door behind her.

Which seems really strange, for a hotel.

“ Discúlpame, ” I say. “Is this Casa del Cielo?”

She cranes her neck, as if to look at the roof, and nods. “Estamos cerrados,” she says, and she looks at me. “Closed,” she adds.

I blink. Maybe this is a siesta kind of thing; maybe all businesses on the island close at (I glance at my watch) . . . 4:30.

She gives the door a sharp tug and starts walking away. Panicked, I run after her, calling for her to wait. She turns, and I rummage in my tote until I find the printed confirmation from the hotel; proof of my two weeks, paid in advance.

She takes the piece of paper from me and scans it. When she speaks again, it is a river of Spanish, and I recognize only a single word: coronavirus .

“When will you be open again?” I ask.

Then she hunches her shoulders, the universal sign for You are shit out of luck .

She gets on a bike and pedals away, leaving me in front of a run-down hotel that has charged me in advance for a room they won’t give me, in a country where I don’t speak the language, on an island where I am stranded for two weeks with little more than a toothbrush.

I wander behind the hotel, which backs up to the ocean. The sky is bruised and tender. Marine iguanas scuttle out of my way as I sit down on an outcropping of lava and take out my phone to call Finn.

But there’s no signal.

I bury my face in my hands.

This is not how I travel. I have hotel reservations and guidebooks and airline mileage accounts. I triple-check to make sure I have my license and passport. I organize. The thought of wandering aimlessly through a town and rolling up to a hotel and asking if there are vacancies makes me sick to my stomach.

My mother had once been in Sri Lanka photographing water buffalo on a beach when a tsunami hit. The elephants, she said, ran for the hills before any of us even realized what was coming. Flamingos moved to higher ground. Dogs refused to go outside. When everything else is running in one direction, she said, it’s usually for a reason .

At the touch of a hand on my shoulder, I jump. The old woman who exited the hotel is now standing behind me. When she smiles, mostly toothless, her lips curl around her gums into her mouth. “Ven conmigo,” she says, and when I don’t move, she reaches out a bony hand and pulls me to my feet.

She holds on to me as if I am a toddler, leading me further down the sandy street of Puerto Villamil. It is not wise, I know, to allow myself to be dragged somewhere by a stranger. But she hardly fits the profile of a serial killer; and I am out of options. Numbly, I follow her past the locked shops and closed restaurants and silent bars, which give way to small, neat dwellings. Some are fancier than others, hiding behind low stucco walls with gates. Others have bicycles rusting against them. Some have yards made of crushed seashells.

The woman turns toward one little house. It is square and made of concrete, painted pale yellow. It has a small porch made out of wood, and wrapped around the legs of its columns are vines thick with a riot of flowers. Instead of climbing the steps, though, she takes me around the back of the house, which slopes down toward the water. There is a courtyard with a metal café table and a rope hammock, some potted plants, and a break in the knee-high wall that leads directly onto the beach. The waves are spreading rumors down the shore.

When I turn around, the old woman has stepped through a sliding glass door and is waving me closer. I walk into a tiny apartment that looks both lived in and not. There is furniture: a worn, ugly brown plaid couch and a driftwood coffee table, scattered rag throw rugs. There is a rickety table big enough for two, with a blushing conch shell in the center holding down a stack of paper napkins. There’s a refrigerator and an oven and a stove. But there are no books on the shelves, no food in the open cupboards, no art on the walls.

“You,” she says, the English sharp on her tongue, “stay.”

I can’t help it, my eyes fill with tears. “Thank you,” I say. “I can pay you. Dolares .”

She shrugs, as if it is absolutely normal for a stranger to offer up a home for a displaced traveler, and money is beside the point. Then again, maybe on Isabela, it is. She smiles and pats her own chest. “Abuela,” she says.

I smile back at her. “Diana,” I reply.

The apartment is a little mystery. There is a twin mattress, and I hunt down sheets in a linen closet. Buried in the back beneath the towels are three T-shirts, soft and faded—one with a flag I do not recognize, another with a black cat, a third with the logo of a company over the breast. That same logo is on a box of oversize promotional postcards that I find in a box—easily several hundred of them. g2 tours, surrounded by pictures of a volcano and a tortoise and a rocky beach and a beady-eyed blue-footed booby. In a pitted armoire in the bedroom I find a pair of flip-flops that are too big for me, and a mask and snorkel. In the bathroom, there is a half-empty tube of toothpaste in a drawer and a bottle of generic ibuprofen. The refrigerator has a few random condiments—mustard, Tabasco—but nothing I can eat.

It is that which drives me out of the relative comfort and safety of the apartment. When my stomach growls so loud I can’t ignore it anymore, I decide to go in search of food and a decent cellphone signal. I peel off the shirt I’ve been wearing for two days and change into the tee with the logo, knotting it at my waist. Then I exit the sliding glass door, and find myself standing at the edge of the world.

The ocean is flirting with the shore, rushing over it and then retreating. A movement draws my attention as a ragged outcropping of rock suddenly animates—not lava rock, as it turns out, but a tangle of marine iguanas that slide into the waves, diving down. I try to follow their trajectory but I lose sight of them when the water gets deep. I shade my eyes with my hand, and try to pick out another island on the horizon, but I can see only an indistinct blur where sea meets sky. I can totally understand how a captain might have charted that point, and believed he could sail over the edge.

I suddenly feel very, very far away from my real life.

It seems like I’m the only person on the beach, but then gradually I notice someone running far in the distance, and if I concentrate, I can hear the whoop of children playing somewhere. When I turn back to the house, upstairs, there is a silhouette of someone—Abuela, I assume—behind a pale curtain.

I could go up there, and mime hunger, and Abuela would likely sit me down and cook me a meal. But it feels rude, especially since she has already given me shelter. I also know, because I just walked through town, that all the businesses are shuttered. Maybe there’s a restaurant or a market in the opposite direction? So I channel my inner Elizabeth Gilbert/Amelia Earhart/Sally Ride and strike out into the unknown.

The only road out of town winds past cacti and tangled brush and brackish water. Flamingos blush, walking on water, the cursive loops of their necks forming secret messages as they dive for shrimp. At certain points the road narrows and is edged with black stones. At others, it is littered with fallen leaves. Everything is green and red and orange; it is like stepping into a Gauguin. My phone has only one bar the entire time.

Finn will freak out if he doesn’t hear from me. On some rational level he knows that there is limited Wi-Fi in the Galápagos. I literally told him on the phone, yesterday, before we were cut off. Plus, the guidebooks all mention it as a caveat and say your best bet is spotty service at your hotel . . . or suggest turning off your phone, and simply enjoying your vacation. To Finn and me, that sounded like heaven. But that was when we thought we would be together inside this bubble of solitude.

If it were the other way around—if he were the one who was stuck somewhere without cell service—I would be worried. I console myself with a pep talk: he knows I landed safely; it has been only a day; I will figure out a way to reach him tomorrow.

By the time I’ve walked for twenty minutes, it’s nearly sunset. The jaunty arms of the cacti re-form in the low light into strangers following me; when iguanas scissor in front of me I jump. I should turn around before it’s too dark for me to find my way back. I am about to resign myself to going to bed hungry when I see a little shed further up the road. I squint, but I can’t quite make out the sign.

By the time I can read it, I know that it’s not a restaurant or a convenience store. centro de crianza de tortugas gigantes . There is a translation in English—giant tortoise breeding center—and just to be extra clear, a picture of a tortoise hatching from an egg.

There is no gate, so I wander into the open-air courtyard. The main building is closed up for the night (or longer?), but a horseshoe of enclosures surrounds me. Each pen is gated by a concrete wall that is a few feet high—certainly big enough for me to lean over, but too high for the tortoises to escape.

I approach one wall and find myself face-to-face with a prehistoric-looking tortoise. Its slitted eyes stare at me as it moves closer on padded feet and stretches its neck up from the hump of its shell. I look at its flat head and dinosaur skin, the black ridges of its toes, its Voldemort nose. It opens its mouth and sticks out a spear of tongue.

Delighted, I lean down on my elbows and watch it turn away, loping across the dusty ground toward another tortoise in the distance. With lumbering underwater movements, it crawls up the shell of the second tortoise, anchoring her so they can mate. The male I’ve been watching curves his neck toward his partner, tendons stretching. His thick arms look like they are covered in chain mail. He grunts, the only sound he’ll make in his life.

“You go, buddy,” I murmur, and I turn away to give them privacy.

In the other enclosures are hundreds of tortoises of varying sizes. They look, heaped, like a collection of army helmets. Some sleep, some are surprisingly limber. Others seem world-weary, as they crawl out of a puddle electric green with algae, or maneuver stalks of food into their mouths. Even the smallest ones remind me of old men, with the wrinkled skin of their throats and bald pates.

In one of the enclosures, a few of the tortoises are chewing on apples. The apples are small and green and seem to have fallen from a tree beyond the concrete pen. I watch the reptiles use their powerful jaws to grind.

My stomach rumbles, and I glance at the tree.

I’m not the kind of person who eats berries off random trees; I’m a New Yorker, for God’s sake, and most of nature looks like a hazard to me. But if the tortoises are eating these, then they have to be safe, right?

I can’t quite reach the fruit. The branches that hang into the pen have already been stripped by the greedy tortoises, so I find myself climbing onto the little wall to grasp an apple.

“Cuidado!”

I turn, almost toppling into the tortoise pen with surprise. The dark has settled like a net, casting shadows, so I can’t see who’s calling to me. I hesitate, and then turn back to the apple tree.

My fingers have just brushed against the skin of the apple when I am yanked off the wall and lose my balance, then find myself sprawled on the dusty ground with a man looming over me. He is yelling in Spanish, and I cannot see his face in the dark. He leans down and grabs my wrist.

I wonder why I assumed it was safe to wander an unfamiliar island by myself.

I wonder if I escaped a pandemic at home only to get attacked here.

I start fighting. When I land a good punch in his ribs, he grunts, and holds me tighter.

“Don’t hurt me,” I cry out. “Please.”

He twists my wrist, and for the first time I feel the burn in my fingertips where they brushed against the skin of the apple. They are blistered and red.

“Too late,” he says in perfect English. “You already did that yourself.”

Wish You Were Here by by Jodi Picoult

Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN-10: 1984818430
ISBN-13: 9781984818430
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Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
14 notes, 12 highlights in this book Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-eight novels, including Wish You Were Here, Small Great Things, Leaving Time, and My Sister's Keeper, and, with daughter Samantha van Leer, two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page. Picoult lives in New Hampshire.
WISH YOU WERE HERE
Diana is venturing into romantically and literally treacherous waters when Picoult yanks this novel off life-support by resorting to a flagrantly hackneyed plot device. Somehow, though, it works, thanks again to that penchant for grounding every fictional scenario in thoroughly documented fact. Throughout, we are treated to pithy if rather self ...
Jodi Picoult's 'Wish You Were Here' is a novel about life during the
Famed author Jodi Picoult novelizes the pandemic in new book 'Wish You Were Here'. Author Jodi Picoult attends the STARZ mid-season premiere of "Outlander" at the Ziegfeld Theatre on April 1, 2015 ...
Review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult is an incredible novel that will keep you guessing. An absolute must-read.
Wish You Were Here
Wish You Were Here. by Jodi Picoult. Publication Date: June 14, 2022. Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction. Paperback: 400 pages. Publisher: Ballantine Books. ISBN-10: 1984818430. ISBN-13: 9781984818430. Diana O'Toole is an associate specialist at Sotheby's, and her boss has hinted at a promotion if she can close a deal with a high-profile client.
Book Review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult is an amazing book that I will not soon forget. I read this over a month ago, and the story is still stuck in my head, with no signs it will leave soon. This is a book about COVID, and some say it's too soon, but I say, it's just in time, and we need more books like this that illustrate the dire ...
Book Review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
Book Review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult. Rating: 3.5 out of 5. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author comes a deeply moving novel about the resilience of the human spirit in a moment of crisis. Diana O'Toole is perfectly on track. She will be married by thirty, done having kids by thirty-five, and move out to the New York City ...
Book Review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
Jodi Picoult, WISH YOU WERE HERE. This compulsively readable fiction is similar to recent books by Laurie Frankel or Taylor Jenkins Reed. A shocking twist at the center of the novel, which is trademark Picoult, will send you reeling and turning back the pages for clues. There are themes of betrayal, family dynamics, forgiveness, and renewal.
Jodi Picoult Wish You Were Here Book Review
In Jodi Picoult's new novel, Wish You Were Here, a woman faces the onset of the COVID pandemic and the world shutting down while alone in the Galápagos.
Wish You Were Here
Wish You Were Hereby Jodi Picoult. Publication Date: June 14, 2022. Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction. Paperback: 400 pages. Publisher: Ballantine Books. ISBN-10: 1984818430. ISBN-13: 9781984818430. From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult comes a deeply moving novel about the resilience of the human spirit in a moment of crisis.
Review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult is a poignant novel that takes place during the early months of the Covid pandemic. Diana O'Toole and her boyfriend, surgical resident Finn Colson have a perfect vision of how their lives are going to go. They are about to embark on a trip to the Galápagos where Diana is sure he is going to pop THE question.
Review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
Book review, full book summary and synopsis for Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult, a novel set during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic about a young woman who ends up stranded on an island in the Galapagos.
Jodi Picoult's 'Wish You Were Here' has quite the pandemic twist
This story is part of a series for people who have already read the book and want to think more deeply about the ending. Major spoilers for "Wish You Were Here" are ahead.
Wish You Were Here
Wish You Were Here, to be released in late November by Jodi Picoult, is a pandemic novel. But it's also so much more. It's about the necessity of malleable hopes and dreams, whether we want to adjust or not. It focuses on one relatively young, upwardly mobile couple living in New York City. Diana O'Toole works at Sotheby's, the famous ...
a book review by Nancy Carty Lepri: Wish You Were Here: A Novel
Wish You Were Here: A Novel by Jodi Picoult book review. Click to read the full review of Wish You Were Here: A Novel in New York Journal of Books. Review written by Nancy Carty Lepri.
Book Review: Wish You Were Here
Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult is a 5-star book with so much heart and thought surrounding the story of Diana as she faces the start of the pandemic in New York City in March 2020. This book treats the COVID pandemic and all who have been impacted by it with care and opened my eyes to others' experiences.
Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult Book Review
Wish You Were Here plot summary. Diana O'Toole works in the world of art sales while her boyfriend, Finn, is a surgeon at a New York City Hospital. The two have planned a two-week vacation in the Galapagos Islands in March of 2022, but when the Covid-19 pandemic breaks out, Finn encourages Diana to go on her own.
Book review: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult centres around a young woman who knows what she wants in life, until that life is turned upside down.
Wish You Were Here Book Review
Book review and publisher synopsis of Jodi Picoult's 2021 novel, Wish You Were Here.
Book Club Questions for Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
Book club questions for Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult examines all the key developments in this impactful read about resilience among a life-changing crisis. There will be spoilers so for more context about the story, check out my spoiler-free review first. Wow, this book. It's one of those that will truly stick with me for a long time.
WISH YOU WERE HERE: BOOK REVIEW
Picoult's Wish You Were Here feels simultaneously relatable and safe. The book follows its protagonist, Diana O'Toole, as she faces problems when her life plan to get a promotion, be married at 30, and have kids by 35 begins to seem impossible and unappealing. When I picked up this book, I felt ready to relive the early days of the pandemic ...
Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
A site dedicated to book lovers providing a forum to discover and share commentary about the books and authors they enjoy. Author interviews, book reviews and lively book commentary are found here. Content includes books from bestselling, midlist and debut authors.
Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
Wish You Were Here. by by Jodi Picoult. Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction. paperback: 400 pages. Publisher: Ballantine Books. ISBN-10: 1984818430. ISBN-13: 9781984818430. From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult comes a deeply moving novel about the resilience of the human spirit in a moment of crisis.
Wish You Were Here (The Complete Volume): A Cozy Parano…
In summary, *Wish You Were Here (Expanded Edition)* by J. Lynn Carr earns a solid 3.5 stars. It's a heartfelt and engaging story that captures the complexities of the human experience with honesty and compassion. For readers seeking a thought-provoking and emotionally resonant read, this book is sure to leave a lasting impression.
What is Project 2025? Wish list for a Trump presidency, explained
Here's your guide to what the document contains. Who wrote Project 2025? It is common for Washington think tanks of all political stripes to propose policy wish lists for potential governments-in ...

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