Wish You Well
An Emotional but Uplifting Historical Fiction Novel
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
From bestselling author and master storyteller David Baldacci, Wish You Well is a dramatic and enthralling tale of family unity in the face of adversity.
Tragedy strikes the New York-based Cardinal family when their car is involved in a terrible accident. Twelve-year-old Lou and seven-year-old Oz survive, but the crash leaves their father dead and their mother in a coma. It would seem their world has been shattered forever until their great-grandmother, Louisa Mae, agrees to raise the children on her Virginia mountain farm.
But before long their rural idyll is threatened by the discovery of natural gas on the mountain. Determined to protect her home from the ravages of big business, Louisa Mae refuses to sell, but when the neighbours hear of the potential wealth the company could bring, they begin to turn against her. And now the Cardinal family find themselves ensnared in another battle, to be played out in a crowded Virginia courtroom: a battle for justice, for survival, and for the right to stay together in the only place they know as home.
Filled with both rich humour and desperate poignancy, Wish You Well is a tale of family, faith, humanity and prejudice, set in the 1940s against the magical backdrop of the Virginia high rock.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
David Baldacci’s Inside Story: “I’ve been into the south-west Virginia mountains where my mother grew up many times. It was a hardscrabble, awful life where starvation was the norm. My mom was the youngest of 10 and oftentimes would be left to live alone by herself when she was a small child as my grandparents would disappear for long periods of time. Being in that country and seeing how people lived back then just really struck me so I had always wanted to write a story about that.
“This is a fictional story. It’s not about my mom’s life, but the environment portrayed—how these people grew up—that is very much my mom’s life. So this book was a very personal endeavour. I interviewed my own mom. These were events that happened to her 50 years ago but her she would tell me the most vivid recollections in such tremendous detail. I would write everything down and ask her, ‘Mom, I can’t even remember where I was yesterday. How in the world do you remember events so vividly from half a century ago?’ My mother was very plain-spoken and she looked at me and said, ‘Honey, when you grow up like that, you don’t forget.’
“When I sent her the book, I cannot tell you how nervous I was. And I don’t get nervous about anything. But she was a person I greatly looked up to and respected, and this was in so many ways her story. Thankfully, she read the book and loved it and after she was finished, we just held each other for a long time and shed some tears. She told me, ‘It brought me back to a place that I never wanted to go back to, but now I’m so glad I did through the pages.’ That alone was worth the time I spent writing the novel.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
HBaldacci is writing what? That waspish question buzzed around publishing circles when Warner announced that the bestselling author of The Simple Truth, Absolute Power and other turbo-thrillersDan author generally esteemed more for his plots than for his characters or proseDwas trying his hand at mainstream fiction, with a mid-century period novel set in the rural South, no less. Shades of John Grisham and A Painted House. But guess what? Clearly inspired by his subjectDhis maternal ancestors, he reveals in a foreword, hail from the mountain area he writes about here with such strengthDBaldacci triumphs with his best novel yet, an utterly captivating drama centered on the difficult adjustment to rural life faced by two children when their New York City existence shatters in an auto accident. That tragedy, which opens the book with a flourish, sees acclaimed but impecunious riter Jack Cardinal dead, his wife in a coma and their daughter, Lou, 12, and son, Oz, seven, forced to move to the southwestern Virginia farm of their aged great-grandmother, Louisa. Several questions propel the subsequent story with vigor. Will the siblings learn to accept, even to love, their new life? Will their mother regain consciousness? AndDin a development that takes the narrative into familiar Baldacci territory for a gripping legal showdownDwill Louisa lose her land to industrial interests? Baldacci exults in high melodrama here, and it doesn't always work: the death of one major character will wring tears from the stoniest eyes, but the reappearance of another, though equally hanky-friendly, is outright manipulative. Even so, what the novel offers above all is bone-deep emotional truth, as its myriad charactersDeach, except for one cartoonish villain, as real as readers' own kinDgrapple not just with issues of life and death but with the sufferings and joys of daily existence in a setting detailed with finely attuned attention and a warm sense of wonder. This novel has a huge heartDand millions of readers are going to love it.
Customer Reviews
Describing Sensation
Amazing novel. Baldacci's Description of people and places are beyond super. Great book deff recommend. Brings tears in his writing beauty