"Wish You Were Here" by Jodi Picoult

An audio book.

Diana (29) works for Sotherby's in New York, selling art (she used to be an artist). She has a plan for her life. Her partner is Finn, a doctor. Her art-restoration father died 4 years before. Her mother, who left years before that, returned with early onset Altzheimers and is in a care home. Diana and Finn have planned a holiday in the Galápagos Islands - she expects to be proposed to there. At the last moment he has to stay - Covid has broken out. When she arrives at the islands, her hotel is closed - lockdown. At old lady offers her a house. Her son Gabriel isn't friendly to her initially. She befriends his daughter Beatrice (14) who can speak English and (unknown to her father) is a cutter. The mother has left the family. Some messages from Finn get through but she has trouble replying. In the end the messages sound like covid-diary entries.

There are flashbacks to her career. Her best friend at work is Rodney, flamboyantly gay. In a side-plot, Kitomi had decided not to sell a painting that was on the cover of a Night Jars album, putting Diana's job at risk.

She has private talks with Gabriel and his daughter (who was bullied at school - later we learn that unknown to her father she's a lesbian). Her mother (a photograper, a Pulitzer prizewinner) has covid and soon dies.

Diana wonders why she's reviewing her relationship with Finn. Gabriel tells her that fishermen cut off shark's fins and throw the shark back into the water. She sleeps with Gabriel while feeling guilty that she doesn't mourn her mother's death. Beatrice sees them and runs away. Beatrice has hoarded (instead of posted) the postcards that Diana has written to Finn.

She wakes up and it is all a dream. While she had covid (she nearly died) in Finn's hospital she had vividly experienced months on holiday. She realises that parts of the dream had real-life causes - delirious, she'd told Finn about her doubts regarding their relationship, for example. Her mother isn't dead. but a few other parts of her dream are strangely true. She feels she's been saved for a reason. She tries to contact others who've had vivid "parallel world" experiences.

She tries to make up with her mother (via video link). When her mother contracts covid she breaks into her room, takes off her mask. Her mother recognises her for the first time in years. Diana's heard about "terminal clarity" - covid has given her mother a way to understand things, to remember other places. She soon dies. Because Diana's taken off her mask, she and Finn have to quarentine for 2 weeks. He's initially angry. He proposes. She says "you're perfect. You're just not perfect for me"

There's an epilogue. 3 years later she's an art therapist. She's living cheaply with Rodney. She visits the Galápagos Islands. She seeks correspondences with her dream.

There are many standard situations (especially the covid-related ones). There are some standard plot twists. These are often foregrounded, giving the book a literary feel. I was surprised that Diana didn't analyse her dream - why was Beatrice a lesbian? At times I felt that the author had done Covid and Galápagos research and wanted to find a way to use it. And yet, I remained interested.

Other reviews

• laurasbooksandblogs (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. ... 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 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.)
• ivereadthis (Despite these somewhat obvious developments, I found myself swept along by Diana’s life, and Picoult is adept at creating a character with obvious flaws, but much to love as well. The problems in her life plan are obvious as soon as you pick up the book, but she’s not an annoying character you want to see fail.)
• kirkus reviews (Picoult yanks this novel off life-support by resorting to a flagrantly hackneyed plot device. Somehow, though, it works, thanks again to that penchant for grounding every fictional scenario in thoroughly documented fact. Throughout, we are treated to pithy if rather self-evident thematic underscoring, e.g. “You can’t plan your life….Because then you have a plan. Not a life.”)

"The Book of Two Ways" by Jodi Picoult

An audio book.

• The narrator, Dawn (nearly 40), once survived a plane crash. Her job is a therapist for dying people - a death mid-wife.
• Then there's an info-dump history lesson about old Egypt.
• Then she returns after there 15 years to a remote site in middle Egypt.
• Then she's starting as a young graduate Egyptology student at Yale and meets Wyatt.
• When she returns to the Egypt site, Wyatt (now a marquess) is still there. He'd used some of her ideas in his publications. She wants a job.
• Then she's back with husband Brian and 14 y.o. daughter Merrit. She wonders whether her love for Brian is an example of Stockholm syndrome. How long has passed since she left? We don't know. She'd walked out after he'd returned innocently from a seductive female graduate's room, forgetting it was Merrit's birthday. Merrit's already a scientist. She has body-image issues.
• We learn that Dawn's father had died early. Her mother (Irish, superstitious) had been suddenly hospiced, disrupting her PhD. She'd met physicist Brian in the hospice waiting room and got pregnant after a consoling one-night-stand. On that first night together "Brian traced my body, mapping me as if I were a new constellation and his destination depended on navigating by it". He told her about the double slit experiment and multiverses, which is used as an analogy for might-have-beens, etc. Aaargh. She has a younger brother, Kieran, so she can't continue her research.

Then the switching of time-lines settles down. She finds a new client, Win - an artist. She tries to find the father of Win's dead son online. Win dictates a letter that she wants Dawn to give to him. Dawn tries to make it up with Brian, realising that the way see touched her mother before she died is the way she's touching Brian now.

We learn about the field trips when Dawn was a student. In the 3rd year she slept with sometime rival Wyatt ("Indiana Jones"). The novel jumps between the 2 phases of her time in Egypt. Soon after her later visit she sleeps with Wyatt again. He has "The bright blue eyes that would have been the pilot light inside me". Then the dig benefactor turns up. Onya is pretty, rich and Wyatt's fiance.

We're nearly half way through before we learn that her brother's a gay doctor. I expect to hear about how he coped with a dying mother. But no.

Dawn has to deliver Win's letter by hand to her ex-lover who lives in London. Merrit has a DNA-testing present which reveals that Brian's not her father (a surprise to all), triggering a chain of events that recapitulates earlier chapters. Dawn still goes to London. At the last moment (not wanting to wreck an apparently happy family by giving news) she doesn't deliver the letter. At the very last moment she doesn't return to Boston but goes to Cairo, the Cairo airport scene repeating almost word for word an earlier section. When she tells Wyatt about the DNA test he flies back with her. The plane (in a section which repeats almost word for word an earlier section) crashes. Dawn and Wyatt survive. Brian meets Wyatt.

Dawn and Wyatt decide they've loved each other for 15 years. Brian accuses her of being selfish. She lists those who she's sacrificed herself for - just about everyone. She attends Win's death. She returns to her house to find Brian, Wyatt and Merrit around the kitchen table eating pizza.

There's a non-binary theme - not just regarding life/death, but also how one act of infidelity needn't destroy a marriage, how decisions needn't be final.

There are long meditations on dying and different coping strategies.

There's too much about Egyptology. When a new subject (marriage, etc) comes up, we hear the old Egypt take on it. This could be a way of showing how obsessed she is with Wyatt. The comparison of new/old attitudes to death is interesting though, and some aspects of hieroglyph interpretation are interesting in themselves. There are some bad sex/love scenes - science imagery when with a scientist, Egypt imagery when with an Egyptologist, etc - "When he swells inside me, when neither of us blinks, I wonder if this is what it's like for the moon when she pulls the tide and changes the shape of the world". I like "We hide in our own pleasure". I'm unsure about "truth vibrates when it's drawn across the bow of pain"

Other reviews

• Goodreads
• Kirkus reviews (The characters’ professions are far better defined than their motivations. A midlife crisis story stifled by enough material for several TED talks.)