Holy SCHMOLY! I took six pages of notes on this one!
This was, unintentionally, my third "pandemic novel" (not counting Emily St John Mandel, she is in a class by herself). I just finished listening to Lucy By the Sea by Elizabeth Strout (review to come) and I read Kimmery Martin's Doctors and Friends more than a year ago when it first came out in November 2021 (https://rawlesreads.blogspot.com/2021/11/doctors-and-friends-by-kimmery-martin.html).
Now, guess when Picoult's book was published. November 2021. Yep, same time as Martin's! And I had no idea it existed until recently. I wonder if people were just not ready for pandemic novels when it was still so new and raw and so much was unknown. The main difference between these two books is that Martin's book was written in 2019 - prior to Covid-19 - and is about three best friends who met in medial school and suddenly face a fictional virus called artiovirus, with similar but not identical symptoms to Covid-19. That is right, book people, Martin, a former emergency room doctor who returned to the front lines during Covid (which is probably part of the reason her book took longer to publish), literally predicted the virus and wrote about what "could be." (She promised later that her next book, predictive or not, would be about World Peace. Haha! She is funny. But I digress.)
Picoult takes a bit of a different tact here. Her novel was written AFTER Covid-19 struck, and is specifically ABOUT Covid-19 and how one woman experienced March 2020 and the months of lockdown. What Picoult absolutely gets right is the feeling of isolation (Diana is stuck on a small island in the Galapagos during lockdown on what was only supposed to be a two week vacation), the frustration and total exhaustion of the medical community (Diana's boyfriend is a doctor back in NYC who can't go with her on vaca for obvious reasons), and a focus on some of the lesser known symptoms of Covid that were new to me, even three years into the pandemic.
This has GOT to be a Book Club Selection because there is so much to talk about here. In true Picoult fashion, we get some twists and surprises and bumps along the way. It has been a while since I read a Picoult book and I had forgotten how tight and beautiful and descriptive her writing is. She says she is known as a fast writer, but that this book was definitely the fastest she has ever written - it took her two months start to finish. Maybe it helped that she herself was in lockdown and did not leave her house for 15 months as a high risk person (she has asthma). But her afterword was just as fascinating as the novel (don't read that first, though, or the discussion questions either, major spoilers abound!).
Wish You Were Here took me right back to those days of being in my own house with my high school and college-age kids, whiling the days away, piddling in my house, not doing much reading because I could not concentrate, and enjoying the silver lining of having this extra at home time with my kids while being terrified of the unseen threat outside my door. Because of her time on a small island and her freedom within the boundaries of the island itself, Diana's lockdown looks a bit different, and she is removed from the devastation her boyfriend sees every day. This really is the story of how people react, change and learn from experiences they can't control and while there is definitely a chance for a bit of PTSD here, it is not really the focus of the story, it is the catalyst. Picoult gives a great nod to the types of experiences the medical community faced, but also the types of experiences other people faced too. We were all affected by this virus in one way or another - we all lost something, as she points out. What we gained, albeit in a very small way, was the release of novels like this that can help us deal with, explain, and share what happened.
Now, Jodi and Kimmery, could we PRETTY PLEASE have a meet-cute between Rodney and Jonah???? Seriously, if Lee Child ever does another edition of Match-Up (look it up), I would campaign hard for a story from the two of you! Compton and Finn meet at a conference? Athena takes a job in a certain OB/GYN practice?
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