Wish You Were Here

One of the things I've always enjoyed about a Jodi Picoult novel is that they're usually rich, with tightly coiled plots that always surprise me. This is no exception. It's one of the first novels with a COVID plotline, set during the early days of the lockdown, when our heroine escapes the chaos of New York City and winds up on an island in the Galapagos. No spoilers here. Read it for yourself. Rights sold to Netflix for adaptation as a feature film • Named one of the best books of the year by She Reads.

I enjoy a story where a woman rethinks her life and tries to decide if the path she is on is the right path.

Diana O’Toole is a woman who thinks she knows what she wants, but as the book goes on, she begins to rethink everything. I had a career that I loved but left it when I had my children. After my kids became more independent, I had to figure out the second chapter of my life and where I wanted my career to go.

Having choices in life is very important and sometimes we put ourselves into… show more.

The pandemic hasn’t been ideal for the experience of wonder—and certainly not deep, intimate relationships with new people who could bring about your demise due to the virus. Picoult masterfully details a woman’s trek through this challenging early COVID terrain, which often appears as a dead end (absolutely no pun intended). But what she does with her circumstances unexpectedly leads her to magical places.

Set during the early days of Covid, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read this book about a woman who decides to take a trip without her boyfriend, who, as a surgeon, is forced to remain behind in the city to deal with a surging virus, and finds herself swept up into a life experience she did not expect as her trip goes awry. It sounded depressing, but this was one of the most fascinating reads I have had in a while. The twist in this literally made my jaw drop, and if you’re a fan of parallel universes, fever… show more.