The best books that utilize COVID in the plot

As the mother of three grown children who also returned home during the pandemic, I loved Patchett’s usage of an unanticipated reunion to tell her children a long, drawn-out story.

I love novels that explore the theme of inheritance, not of material possessions, but the emotional skills that are handed down between generations. Patchett explores what we share and what we hold back, as well as our children’s seemingly insatiable appetite for stories about our young lives.

This book is also a love story about Northern Michigan and a life dedicated to farming orchards. The protagonist's point of view may be that of a grown woman in her fifties, but in recounting the love affair of one summer, she reaffirms her own life choices. 

As if relationships between siblings and spouses aren’t already complicated enough, Cunningham throws the isolation and distance of COVID into the mix.

I love this author’s ability to turn extremely authentic and simple domestic dramas occurring on one day into revelatory ideas about child-rearing and the expectations family members have of one another. A generation of young parents, their inquisitive children, the devotion of a brother and sister, and an infatuation between brothers-in-law are the subjects of this well-paced work.

The effect of the pandemic on a marriage, on family members' psyches, and the aftermath of one of their deaths is written with tenderness and insight. This is a fabulous read depicting the new age in which we live.

Elizabeth Strout is perfecting a practice I’m sold on–the literary recasting of characters from one novel to the next.

In this book, I got to return to Lucy Barton and her ex-husband, William, who were thrown together in a cabin in Maine due to the pandemic. Writing the novel from the first-person perspective of the protagonist, Strout includes this pragmatic character’s interior musings, specifically the things we increasingly noticed as time slowed down during COVID.

I could so relate to Lucy’s quirky character: give me ornery, critical, and desperate any day! Weren’t we all?  

This YA novel was the first I read set during COVID times, and it hit me with the urgency of The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.

I loved the author’s unwavering courage in tackling the racial subject matter head-on. Heartbreaking and whip-smart, it taught me what teens were going through with regard to virtual friendship, classrooms, and pop stardom. Farley’s novel captures a moment in time during the pandemic while others were still processing it.

Like a photo album, I wasn’t quite ready to revisit, it portrays the importance of a difficult time in our nation’s history coupled with that uneasy age of adolescence. Entertaining, yes, but a historical artifact, definitely.  

The opening of this book knocked me out, and I was hooked.

I usually veer toward literary, slower, familial dramas, but this book combined what I love in literary family dynamics with the frightening premise of an inexplicable disaster occurring in the outside world. The suspicion we were quick to possess about others during the early days of the pandemic is heightened to a new level with two couples pitted against each other, one preoccupied with the welfare and antics of their children.

I loved the construct that had even spouses second-guessing each other. The intensity of the situation brought out the worst and eventually the better sides of all the characters, a phenomenon that resonated as I read this book during the first year of the pandemic, at the same time rioters invaded our nation’s capital.