Wish You Were Here, by Jodi PIcoult

[boxofdelights]

I read this for book group, and I shouldn't have. I don't want to read fiction about the pandemic that we are still in, especially not where the pandemic is used as the engine of a romance novel.

The pandemic traps successful career-minded New Yorker Diana O'Toole in a tropical island vacation, away from her #relationshipgoals rich white handsome kind doctor boyfriend, who loves her completely, whose life plan matches hers like left and right hands, and who is "steady. Like...white noise."

But twist! It's all a dream. Actually she has covid and is hallucinating all of this. She recovers, and her hallucination vacation makes her see that she must change her life.

But twist! After she breaks up with the boyfriend who is perfect, but not for her, and goes back to school to become an art therapist, she takes the trip that she hallucinated taking, and meets the guy she hallucinated falling in love with!

Also, using fake Yoko Ono to establish just how brilliant Diana's pre-pandemic prospects were is gross.

Comments

[cimorene]

Well, it actually does kind of sound like a fanfic plot, especially the ending where it was all a dream but then he finds the guy in real life, so it's like prophetic, or fated.

But I definitely wouldn't put up with that Yoko Ono part, and also I just sort of have that motto about writing quality. And if they just left her own name, which is more likely in fanfiction because people aren't as afraid of being sued... I would probably still give up at that point in exasperation like "Are you kidding me?!" and fling the story across the room, metapohrically.

I actually WILL read fanfiction in spite of all kinds of problems, including completely incoherent sentences and near-total lack of punctuation, occasionally! It all depends on how I'm feeling and how much I want to read that particular pairing/fandom/concept. But those are exceptions I'm making because the author is sharing their ideas with me about the fannish obsession that we share! I'm not going to do all that just to read someone's generic romance novel. But I also do stop reading fanfiction for a huge variety of reasons when something just won't go down right, and there's no reason to be any more forgiving of a published book. After all, there's an infinity of other published books out there that might not piss me off, and on top of that there's plenty of fanfiction that at least does feature my beloved fannish objects if nothing else.