“The idea of leaving without him doesn’t appeal to me at all. It is not normal. And it’s even less to consider taking a friend in his place – anyway, I don’t know any who would agree to leave for two weeks like that, on the spur of the moment. So here is Diana, almost 30 years old, New Yorker through and through, employed at Sotheby’s, living in a relationship with Finn, an attractive surgeon with whom she wishes to marry and start a family, on her way to Isabela, one of the Galapagos Islands.
Remember that I wish you were hereby Jodi Picoult (The Book of Two Paths, Actes Sud, 2021), begins on March 13, 2020, the day when everything stopped on this side of the globe: “At the same moment, the water taxi moved away from the quay. And suddenly I realize that by wanting to seem more cool than what I am in reality, I have just deliberately washed up on an island. »
And in addition, Diana has lost her suitcase and only has her swimsuit, her toothbrush and her cell phone for luggage. But what good is a phone when you can’t find a wifi network? Arriving at the hotel, she bangs her nose on the door. How can you not blame her lover for having forced her to go to this paradise island while he tries to save patients with coronavirus?
Then enters the scene, in a striking way, Gabriel, a handsome, dark, unattractive, even irascible man: “I struggle like a handsome devil. The man growls when I land a good punch in the ribs. His embrace tightens. »
Jodi Picoult would announce that she wants to retrain in the Harlequin novel or write the next seasons ofEmily in Paris — Diana is less fluent in Spanish than Emily is in French — that we wouldn’t fall out of our chairs. In fact, all the clichés specific to romance novels and sentimental comedies amass there in spades. And then, bang! Halfway through, the novelist disconcerts the reader with a theatrical twist that could not be more hackneyed.
If she made the choice to send her heroine to the very place where Darwin studied the behavior of finches, it was to engage in reflection on the adaptability of human beings. Through the character of Finn, who immediately appears selfish and ambitious, and that of Diana’s mother, an internationally renowned photographer placed in a center for people with loss of autonomy, Jodi Picoult brings back to memory the courageous fight of medical personnel against the invisible threat and the isolation experienced by the most deprived and vulnerable among us.
In doing so, she evokes the events that not only upset everyday life, but also caused damage, sometimes irreversible, to physical and mental health. Although she likes to cast doubt on what Diana really experienced during this dark period – to the point of provoking the reader’s exasperation – Jodi Picoult nevertheless signs a moving duty of memory against a backdrop of romance with exotic scents.