Wish You Were Here, by Jodi PIcoult
May. 15th, 2022 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
boxofdelightsI 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.
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.
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Date: 2022-05-16 05:16 am (UTC)What?
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Date: 2022-05-16 05:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-16 05:33 am (UTC)This book doesn't sound very good.
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Date: 2022-05-16 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-16 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-16 09:48 am (UTC)Thanks for the warning.
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Date: 2022-05-16 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-16 08:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-16 09:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-17 11:50 pm (UTC)In my experience, hate reads are the best for book clubs. The book has already demonstrated that the bar will be low, which mitigates participants' speaking anxiety.
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Date: 2022-05-16 09:16 am (UTC)If you wouldn't put up with it from fanfiction, don't put up with it from original shit that doesn't even feature your favorite beloved fan object!!!
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Date: 2022-05-16 10:06 pm (UTC)I would put up with any of these tropes in fanfiction, except for fake Yoko Ono. RPF is a difficult problem, and I'm not saying that fanfic has found the solution, but putting in enough details to make everybody think about Yoko Ono but calling her by a different name is Definitely Not It.
But yeah, if it were Ray Kowalski who was so sick that he had to be put on a ventilator and drugged senseless, and his mind went on an adventure with a fascinating, brilliant, infuriating man who saved his life, and as a result of that adventure he realized that Stella, even though she was everything he had always dreamed of, was not right for him, and -- even more important -- the man he had to be in order to be with her was not right for him, so he got divorced and got his own apartment and went undercover and then!!! Walked into his new precinct and discovered that his new partner was the man from his dream! Who didn't recognize Ray at all, and just looked shocked when Ray hugged him and called him "buddy"!
...yeah, I would eat that up with a spoon. Because Due South has already done the work to make me long for these two to end up together. Also Due South created a world in which this is the sort of thing that does happen. Wish You Were Here failed at both of those.
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Date: 2022-05-17 09:31 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2022-05-16 01:21 pm (UTC)I recently read a mystery that is significantly about the pandemic, but the people who seem to be using the pandemic for dubious ends don't include the author. And my review of that was "this is a good book, here are the content warnings."
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Date: 2022-05-16 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-16 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-16 11:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-16 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-16 11:21 pm (UTC)Or maybe she does have a writing community but everyone in it thinks "this sells more books" and "this is good" mean the same thing!
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Date: 2022-05-17 11:52 pm (UTC)Not so much a writing community as a writing board of directors?