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Our Review
As one of the bestselling writers of legal thrillers like Absolute Power, David Baldacci is known for his hair-raising plots and fast-paced suspense. But in a significant departure from his usual fare (though the end result is no less compelling), Baldacci slows things down a bit for his latest saga, Wish You Well, a story he culled from his own family's history and experiences. It's a coming-of-age tale reminiscent of that timeless classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, where the setting -- Virginia mountain coal country in the post-Depression '40s -- is as much a character as any of the people who walk the pages.

The lives of 12-year-old Lou Cardinal and her eight-year-old brother, Oscar ("Oz"), are forever altered when an auto accident takes the life of their writer father and leaves their mother in a catatonic state. Used to the hectic bustle of New York City, they find themselves transplanted to the mountain cabin home of their great-grandmother, Louisa Mae Cardinal. Their new home has no electricity or running water, and their food comes not from any grocery store but from the barn and the land. Their new neighbors are simple folk, many of them poor, uneducated, and worked to the bone. But beneath them all is The Mountain, with its power to mesmerize and nurture their minds and their souls.

Though Lou rebels against her new life at first, she eventually grows to appreciate her hardscrabble existence, rising before dawn to milk the cows, attending school in a one-room schoolhouse, and then working till dusk to prepare, plant, and harvest crops. Her great-grandmother's simple lifestyle, boundless spirit, and obvious love of The Mountain become contagious. But there is plenty of ugliness here, too, not the least of which is the pervasive poverty and prejudicial ignorance subscribed to by some. When a greedy corporate entity enters the picture, Baldacci takes his readers into territory more familiar, culminating the tale in a highly satisfying David-and-Goliath-style courtroom battle.

The title is an apt one, a reference to Oz and Lou's childish wishes and their belief in things wondrous and magical, a belief that often slams up against the harsh truths of reality. Yet in the end, something magical does prevail. And although all the characters in this tale may not survive, the mystical allure of The Mountain and its effect on those who come to know it, does.

--Beth Amos

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The year is 1953-and the worst of tragedies has struck the Cardinal family. A devestating car accident takes the life of Jack Cardinal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and leaves his young wife a bedridden invalid who has completely withdrawn. Lou and her younger brother Oz travel by train with their mother to the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, where their great-grandmother Louisa lives on a remote farm, ready and willing (if not financially prepared) to take the broken family in.

Rising every morning hours before dawn, working on the farm and learning at the school house their father attended years before, Lou and Oz slowly begin to heal emotionally and grow in unexpected ways. All while waiting for their silent mother to return to them. When a natural gas company comes to town and makes an offer on her land, Louisa refuses to sell. To keep their farm, with the weight of the company and their own greedy neighbors against them, the family must rely on tyhe kindliness of a town lawyer to try their case in court-while both Lou and Oz pray for a miracle. The climactic courtroom battle is as unpredictable as it is relentless and will not only decide the fates of Lou, Oz, and their mother, but also all who have been touched by them.

SYNOPSIS

David Baldacci has always delivered great stories, authentic characters, and thought-provoking ideas since he burst on the literary scene with Absolute Power. Now this versatile writer movingly evokes the charms of rural America as he makes us believe in the great and little miracles that can change lives￯﾿ﾽor save them.

Wish You Well
Precocious twelve-year-old Louisa Mae Cardinal lives in the hectic New York City of 1940 with her family. Then tragedy strikes￯﾿ﾽand Lou and her younger brother, Oz, must go with their invalid mother to live on their great-grandmother￯﾿ﾽs farm in the Virginia mountains. Suddenly Lou finds herself coming of age in a new landscape, making her first true friend, and experiencing adventures tragic, comic, and audacious. But the forces of greed and justice are about to clash over her new home￯﾿ﾽand as their struggle is played out in a crowded Virginia courtroom, it will determine the future of two children, an entire town, and the mountains they love.

FROM THE CRITICS

Patty Rhule - USA Today

Wish You Well has plenty of appealing elements.

Publishers Weekly

Baldacci 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-thrillers--an author generally esteemed more for his plots than for his characters or prose--was 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 subject--his maternal ancestors, he reveals in a foreword, hail from the mountain area he writes about here with such strength--Baldacci 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? And--in a development that takes the narrative into familiar Baldacci territory for a gripping legal showdown--will 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 characters--each, except for one cartoonish villain, as real as readers' own kin--grapple 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 heart--and millions of readers are going to love it. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

Although this story starts out slowly, by page 50 or so it has become a page-turner. A car trip turns tragic for 12-year-old New Yorker Louisa Mae Cardinal (Lou) and her younger brother Oscar (Oz) when their idolized father Jack is killed and their mother is badly injured. As there seems to be no hope for her recovery, the children are sent to their father's grandmother, their great-grandmother Louisa, in rural Virginia. It's 1940, but the Civil War is still being fought in the town and on the schoolyard. Louisa's farmhouse is old-fashioned, with no electricity or indoor plumbing, and the farm holds almost nothing to interest the city children. What it means for them, at least at the beginning, is hard work. Lou disagrees with everyone about everything. Oz talks to their comatose mother for hours, feeling that some time she will come back to them—she must. When Lou realizes what he's doing, she fears for his sanity. She is sure her mother won't recover, but she exercises her mother's muscles every day anyway. Gradually she begins to make friends and gets more used to the work. When she manages to learn to plow a field with the mule, and Louisa gives her a horse of her own to ride, she begins to see the land as her heritage. Just in time, too, as a gas company has discovered that there is gas buried in a deserted coal mine on the farm. Lou knows a lot of cheating has been going on, and, with the help of a lawyer who was in love with her mother, determines to do something about it. An excellent portrait of race and class distinction of the time and place, and of a young woman growing up. And a good read. Category: Paperback Fiction. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for seniorhigh school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Warner, 370p., Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Judith H. Silverman; Chevy Chase, MD

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