Synopsis:
Dear Holly and Anna,
I knew it would take drastic measures to bring you together. So — ta da! — one drastic measure!
I’m sorry I died. And I know you guys haven’t spoken in five years. But here’s the plan. Over fourteen days, you are going to scatter my ashes in every place we vacationed together in our twenties.
I wish I could have fixed your friendship before I died. But dying comes with one perk — you can’t say no to me now.
You’re going to have the best time. I’ve planned rum cocktails in Cabo and café hopping in Paris. Along the way, I’ll keep sending you letters. Because there’s a secret that I wasn’t brave enough to share when I was alive . . . and if I know the three of us, I suspect we’ve all been hiding something from each other.
The times we spent together were the best days of my life. Nobody made me laugh like you did, Anna. Holly, promise you’ll let your hair down one last time for me.
I hope by the end of this trip, there’s nothing left that we’re afraid to say . . .
xo,
Zoe
Review:
Authors Kerry Lonsdale and Orly Konig met in 2010 when they were both “budding writers with big dreams” and were assigned to be critique partners. Both were members of the Romantic Women’s Fiction chapter of the Romance Writers Association. They quickly became friends who felt they had known each other their whole lives. Together, they founded the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and dreamed of co-authoring a book.
Fifteen years passed as they traveled together and eventually found themselves at a writing retreat. Enjoying a bottle of wine, they mulled over story ideas that eventually became the basis for The Wish List Trip. They say the books “themes of enduring friendship, the healing power of travel, and the courage it takes to reconnect after time apart aren’t just fictional. They’re woven from our own experience.”
The story opens with a letter from Zoe to her two best friends, Holly and Anna, when she knew she was dying from cancer. She meticulously planned a fourteen-day adventure for her to embark on after her death. She was confident they would agree to scatter part of her ashes in six places they all visited together – Cabo San Lucas; Napa, California; Bozeman, Montana; Paris, France; Aspen, Colorado; Santorini, Grece — and finally, the place they wanted to visit but never got to see, the Mayan Riviera. She penned letters for them to read at specific junctures, revealing facts about herself and her life that she withheld from her beloved friends. Cleverly, she directed that they take turns opening the letters, ensuring that they would have to travel together and cooperate with each other in order to learn all the details contained in them.
She challenged her friends to be fully present at each location — “Let go and find a spark of joy like we shared that first time; Find a way to releae what you’re afraid to show the world about yourselves.” – and both relive moments they shared there, as well as enjoy new experiences together. And, most importantly, find a way to repair their broken relationship.
She ended each letter with a plea that they never forget her.
Holly and Anna met when they were assigned to be college roommates and continued residing together throughout college. When they met Zoe, the three young women formed a sisterhood.
Holly always felt somewhat like an outsider because Zoe and Anna both came from wealth and privilege, and she could not afford all of the things they could easily acquire. That feeling intensified during the past five years as Anna remained closer to Zoe. During their last girls’ trip (to Greece), Anna’s reckless behavior jeopardized everything Holly had worked so hard for. Furious, and feeling betrayed and frightened, Holly returned home to salvage her life and career. She and Anna never spoke again.
Until they are summoned to the home of Zoe’s emotionally distant parents, advised of Zoe’s final wishes, and challenged to decide whether to comply with Zoe’s request. Anna is eager to embark on the journey and repair her relationship with Holly, who is extremely reluctant. As a practical matter, Anna owns her own business and can travel whenever she likes. But Holly is a married mother of a young son and a high school principal, so planning to be away for two full weeks is much more difficult, both logistically and emotionally. She has never been apart from her child that long.
Ultimately, though, Holly accedes and the two women embark on a physically and psychologically exhausting sojourn back to the places the three friends visited together. Zoe took care of all the arrangements and has prepared a detailed itinerary so all they have to do is recreate their previous experiences, create new memories, leave portions of Zoe’s ashes there and, hopefully, reconcile.
The Wish List Trip is part mystery. What information did Zoe withhold from her friends over the years? Why wasn’t she completely candid but, rather, felt she had to maintain secrecy about aspects of her life? What exactly did Anna do that was so potentially damaging to Holly and, in her estimation, unforgivable?
The story is also, at times, hilarious because some parts of the trip don’t go exactly as planned. The dialogue is crisp, often biting, and always believable. And the tale is deeply, gut-wrenchingly tragic. Lonsdale and Konig deftly reveal their characters’ heartbreaks and struggles, flaws, stubborn determination to be right, and dogged refusal to appreciate the others’ perspectives. But they also skillfully showcase their characters’ gradual realization that they have already wasted enough time being hurt and angry – after all, they have already lost Zoe – and discovery of what really matters in life. Lonsdale and Konig illustrate that perspective is all-too-often hard earned.
Much of the story’s success is attributable to the fact that Holly and Anna are opposites. Holly is organized, stable, methodical. And at times she is resentful because she (mistakenly) believes Anna has had an easier life. She doesn’t view Anna’s luxury travel concierge business as a “real” job and is infuriated by Anna’s obsessive posting on social media accounts. Meanwhile, Anna resents Holly’s refusal to acknowledge that she has built a thriving business completely on her own and understand the vital role that social media plays in its success. She secretly harbors desires that Holly would find surprising and is determined to gain Holly’s forgiveness and respect because she has desperately missed her friend. Anna is not as flighty and vapid as she appears when she arrives with five suitcases full of designer clothing and constantly snaps those annoying selfies she uploads to Instagram. She is, in fact, self-aware, intelligent, and full of longing for very understandable reasons to reestablish her friendship with Holly. She categorically rejects a well-intentioned suggestion that Holly’s friendship “isn’t worth your effort” and “maybe your friendships with Zoe and Holly were only meant to be for part of your life, not your whole life.”
Long-term female friendships are complicated and always provide ample material around which authors can base compelling stories. In The Wish List Trip, Lonsdale and Konig skillfully explore the ways in which their characters have related to each other over the years, as well as their anger, fears, and regrets, through first-person narratives from Holly and Anna. And, of course, those letters from Zoe that reveal how deeply the dying young woman loved her friends . . . and how intent she was on helping them find their way back to each other.
For anyone who has enjoyed a long-time, close friendship, there is much to relate to and contemplate in The Wish List Trip, including how unimportant, in the overall scope of life, squabbles and disagreements, and pride really are. Anyone who has lost a cherished friend of many years will cheer for Holly and Anna to find a way to put aside their messy past, forgive each other and themselves, and resolve to never let anything come between them again so that they can enjoy however much time they still have together.
Because The Wish List Trip beautifully illustrates, sans preachy tone or heavy-handed plot machinations, that we are never granted enough time and it always elapses too quickly.
Is there a moral to the authors’ story? Indeed. Call your friends, take the trips you’ve dreamed about together, overlook their faults, and ask them to tolerate yours. Make as many memories as you can.
Because when all is said and done, memories are all that remain.
Also by Kerry Lonsdale:
Standalone Novels
The Everything Series
The No More Trilogy
