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.

The twist

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.

My rating.

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