Title: Wish You Were Here

Author: Jodi Picoult

Book Length (Audiobook) 11 hours 47 minutes

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Genre: Fiction, Contemporary, Romance, Women’s Fiction, Realistic Fiction

Read Start Date: February 4, 2022

Read Finish Date: February 8, 2022

Brief Summary of the Plot from Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57701764-wish-you-were-here

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 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. 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.

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.

My Review: Right off the bat, I will notify you that I will include spoilers in this review because there is just no way to express my disappointment otherwise. As the summary above states, Diana heads to the Galapagos and gets stuck there due to the lockdown. While she is there, her boyfriend Finn, a resident in a NYC hospital, comes face to face with COVID-19 and battles daily to save his patients from dying, often times not succeeding. These situations / scenarios are spelled out in great detail and I have to be honest, it was a bit much for me and detracted from the story.

During Diana’s time on the island, her boyfriend Finn is writing her emails about his experiences in the ICU. There was no mention of this in the book summary, so it came as a unwanted surprise. Finn goes into great detailed about how sick people are, how scared people are, how people are dying and how many. Why do I want to read about this in a fiction book? This has been REALITY for 2+ years!

I had COVID-19, alpha version, in November 2020. I was sick for 2 weeks, and had brain fog for 4 weeks. I was terrified of being one of those people who’s oxygen level drops but you don’t know it. Therefore, I regularly checked my oxygen levels with a pulseox device I bought on Amazon. I do not need to be reminded of how shitty COVID-19 is while reading something for entertainment. I want to be taken from my reality, not have it hammered into my brain with tons of detail, of which I already knew since I follow the news rather closely.

Despite the emails Diana received from Finn, I really enjoyed reading about Diana’s escape from the pandemic by living as a local on the island. Therefore, I was really disappointed when it came to light in Part 2 of the book, that the life Diana was living on the island was only a hallucination brought on by having COVID and being on a ventilator. Seriously? WTF. It honestly really ruined the book for me. Back in reality, Diana is facing a deteriorating relationship and of course COVID. Why couldn’t the island storyline have been the reality? Why did Diana have to have COVID, and why was it the version of COVID that almost made her die? I mean in the book the author made it seem like ALL COVID positive people die and die horribly. This was definitely not the case.

Would I recommend this book? Eh, probably not. Unless you like reading about the very pandemic you are going through right now. In my opinion this book was too soon and probably would have been better 10 years from now when (hopefully) all this shit is just a memory.