Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

 genre: contemporary fiction

When Diana and her nearly-fiance Finn plan their trip to the Galapagos Islands, it's just the next step in the plans they've made for their lives together.  But when a strange new virus shows up at Finn's hospital where he's a resident, they both wonder if maybe this coronavirus thing is a reason to not take that trip of a lifetime.  In the end, Diana decides to go. And Finn stays in New York.  Arriving in the Galapagos, though, things immediately go wrong.  That weird virus has shut the world down, immediately, and Diana is stuck in paradise.  Alone.

This is the first novel I've ever read that is about our new Covid world.  Sometimes, it was hard to remember those early days. How little we knew, how startling and surreal it all was.  We get snippets of New York life from Finn - but mostly, this is the story of Diana.  Diana who loves art and who has a way of making friends out of people you might not expect.  It's a story of an island and how people can make anywhere into a home.  It's about stretching out of who we are and into who we might be if only circumstances beyond our control force us to think outside the box we've made for ourselves.  It's about the idea that paradise is, in some ways, a state of mind - that anywhere can be a paradise or a purgatory, depending on what's waiting for us on the other side.

I appreciated the plot that never went too slow, I appreciated the twist that I never saw coming, I loved imagining the Galapagos.  I hurt for Finn and for every health care professional who had to go to bat for all of us in a war zone that constantly shifted and changed.  I also loved that that part of the pandemic is behind us.  It was strange that Diana and Finn's experience was eerily universal,  because even though I wasn't a doctor in New York, Finn and Diana felt and experienced many of the same things I did, on some level.  It feels solid to me that novelists are now creating works that will imprint this shared history for the future, as bizarre as that is.  I was ready for a book like this.