43 pages • 1 hour read
David BaldacciWish You Well
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Wishing Well
Early in the book, Diamond recounts the tale of the magic wishing well to an enthralled Oz and Lou. The well appears at various points in the book and always as a symbol of the power of belief. Oz has no trouble believing that the well will grant Amanda her health if he only wishes hard enough and gives up the object most dear to him. Of course, Oz is aware of Lou’s disapproval of his fanciful nonsense, so he sneaks out late at night to perform his ritual and sacrifice his favorite teddy bear.
Despite Lou’s mockery, midway through the book she is feeling desperate enough to give the well a try. This represents a turning point in her rigid habit of facing facts as opposed to believing in possibilities. Her own sacrifice is somewhat ambivalent since the object she chooses may not, arguably, be her most precious possession. It’s a photo of herself and Amanda. Though still ambivalent, Lou’s heart has softened enough so that she retrieves Oz’s teddy bear and puts the photo in its place.
The real turning point in Lou’s journey toward faith takes place when she sacrifices the packet of letters that her mother wrote to Louisa. Ironically, the true sacrifice isn’t the letters themselves. Lou has changed the nature of her wish. She is now asking the well to restore Louisa’s health. In effect, Lou is willing to forego her mother’s recovery in exchange for Louisa’s. This is the real sacrifice, since Lou wants her mother to be well more than anything but is willing to give up that hope to save her great-grandmother.
The well proves its power by granting Lou’s wish when Louisa recovers long enough to hear Lou’s profession of love before she passes away. Then, Amanda miraculously recovers too. The wishing well also references the book’s title, since it is used to wish two women into a state of wellness—to wish them well.
Old Mo
A mountain lion known as “Old Mo” stalks the area around Louisa’s farm. Despite its fearsome reputation for killing livestock, the creature acts as a guardian spirit to the Cardinal children. One day, when the children accidentally wander across George Davis’s property, and he threatens them with a shotgun, the altercation is cut short by the scream of the mountain cat: “Then the scream came. It rose higher and higher until Lou figured the trees must surely topple from the force, or the rocks would work loose and slide down the mountain and maybe, with luck, crush their antagonist” (81).
A similar distraction occurs on the night when Mrs. Davis gives birth to her son, and Lou and Louisa act as midwives. George is about to throw the women off his property at gunpoint when the cat’s screams are heard once more. Fearing for his livestock, George goes off to protect them and allows the birthing process to continue unhampered.
The most unusual appearance of Old Mo takes place on the night when a grief-stricken Lou rides to Diamond’s cabin and is encircled by a pack of wild dogs. They are poised to attack when Old Mo arrives and chases the pack off. Afterward, he follows the girl and Jeb as they make their way back to the farm:
She beheld the amber eyes of the cat out of the darkness as it ran parallel to them through the woods. That terrifying animal could shred both girl and hound in seconds. And yet all that thing did was run next to them, never once venturing out of the woods (307-08).
Old Mo is an ambivalent figure, at once terrifying and protective. He is the living embodiment of nature and the mountain itself, as Louisa so often describes it. “High rock be beautiful. High rock be cruel” (298).
Letters
The power of the word features prominently in the novel, as might be expected since the story concerns a deceased writer and his similarly talented daughter. When Cotton first suggests reading Jack’s books to Amanda, Lou scorns the idea; this seems too much like another man stealing her father’s words and using them to court her mother.
Aside from Jack’s novels themselves, the motif of letters recurs both in the sense of packets of letters and in letters of the alphabet. Louisa has kept packets of letters from both Jack and Amanda over the years. Lou develops a better understanding of her father’s connection to high rock from his letters. However, she initially refuses to open the packet of letters from her mother to Louisa. As her attitude softens, Lou demonstrates her new sense of hope by reading the letters aloud to Oz and Amanda.
Lou becomes preoccupied with letters of a different sort when she encourages Eugene to master the alphabet and coaches him through reading a book. She also pesters Diamond about his own limited ability to read. Significantly, the boy was working on a whittling gift for Lou at the time of his death. It was a carving of their initials—two letters of the alphabet: “It was cut from hickory, shape of a heart, the letter L carved on one side, an almost finished D on the other. Diamond Skinner had known his letters” (272).
The motif of letters appears in yet another way when Lou sacrifices the packet of Amanda’s letters to the wishing well. As a nascent writer herself, Lou appreciates the power of the word. Her choice of an appropriate sacrifice to restore Louisa boils down to what she values most in life—letters. Letters of the alphabet can be combined to form words. Words make stories, and stories move people’s hearts. Lou’s future life as an author becomes the embodiment of this principle.
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By David Baldacci
