Wish I Were Here by Melissa Wiesner is an adventurous and open-hearted romantic comedy about a precise and exacting mathematician whose world is turned upside-down in a case of missing identity.
Catherine Lipton of
Pittsburgh, Penn. is thrilled when she’s offered a university math
professorship. However, when the college requests original documents for her
employment file, the single, 29-year-old learns she doesn’t exist. Her birth
certificate and Social Security information aren’t even found in any databases.
This forces Catherine to find a way to substantiate her existence.
Catherine seeks the help of her career-averse, bohemian father, who has lived intent on pursuing his dreams of clown performing—juggling, his specialty. As a single dad who raised Catherine--Catherine’s mother walked out on them--he refuses to help Catherine’s search for her mother who might retain the original documents needed for Catherine’s dream job. Desperate, Catherine accepts help offered by Luca Morelli, the handsome, heavily tattooed, artsy doorman who oversees her apartment building, which is filled with fun-loving octogenarians. The somewhat sinister connections offered by Luca and those in his orbit steep Catherine in unexpected complications, while offering readers amusingly plotted twists and turns.
Female
protagonists whose lives comedically derail, forcing them to change, are
hallmarks of Wiesner’s (The
Second Chance Year) cleverly inventive
romcoms. In Wish
I Were Here, she builds on this foundation with great charm and wit.
Wish
I Were Here by
Melissa Wiesner
Forever, $17.99 paperback, 9781538741948, 368
pages
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE
NOTE:
This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf
Awareness. To read this review as originally
published on Shelf
Awareness (October 18, 2024),
link HERE