Summary of ‘Wish You Well’
Wish You Well begins with the Cardinal family going on a trip to California. Jack Cardinal, the father of Lou and Oz, is an accomplished but underpaid writer who thinks of moving to California for better opportunities, an idea that his wife Amanda opposes.
They both get into an argument. Although Lou Cardinal, 12 year old daughter of Jack and Amanda tries to stop the squabble but it escalates further up to a point that Jack doesn’t even see a man in the middle of the road.
He tries to steer away in order to avoid a clash and thus the car meets a fatal accident in which Jack dies and Amanda falls into a comatose state.
The family is forced to move to the rural life of the Appalachian mountains where their great-grandmother Louisa Mae lives. Louisa is a strong willed woman who works tirelessly to keep her farm running.
But life in the mountains is completely different from the one in the city, Lou and Oz must learn to do different chores, the realities of rural life in a tightly knit but wary community.
Louisa acts as their guiding force teaching them resilience and self-reliance, also taking care of them in the process.
The children form friendship with a boy named Diamond who takes them on various adventures showing them around. Also, there comes a lawyer Cotton Longfellow who offers to read to Amanda in the hope that she would get better one day.
Lou and Oz thus start feeling comfortable in this new life however it is poor in comparison to what they had in the city.
Things take a turn when a powerful coal and gas company, Southern Valley, sets its eyes on Louisa’s land and offers her 100,000 $ to which she refuses. But her neighbours pressurize her to accept the deal as unless Louisa accepts they won’t get anything for their share of land.
Soon after Diamond dies and Louisa suffers a stroke after her barn is torched in the night. She dies of the stroke.
Southern Valley comes back with an offer 5 times their original price but this Cotton Longfellow refuses. This leads to an eventful legal battle in which a Richmond lawyer Thurston Goode represents Southern Valley who fights against Cotton.
In the end, Southern Valley wins the case but Amanda suddenly comes to the scene along with her children and moves the jury in the court.
The family gets the land back for which Louisa fought so hard.
In the epilogue, Lou states that Cotton and her mother married after which he adopted the children. Oz became a big Major League baseball player who retired and became a school teacher. Lou also went out of the mountains to become a writer but she came back to the mountains again to live the rest of her life at the family home.
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