I Wish You Would

Liberty Prep is very unlike the State schools familiar to UK readers in its culture and values. Serving a community in coastal California, it is small (the entire Senior Class has only 67 students), fee-paying and devoted to its own traditions. Readers never visit classrooms where actual work is in progress and meet only a couple of teachers. The focus of debut novelist Eva Des Lauriers is on Liberty’s extra-curricular life, largely run by students.

Natalia Diaz-Price was elected Class President during her Freshman, Sophomore and Junior Years. Now starting her final year, she is Student Body President, determined that her year will be different, though she has distracting issues at home, which has been in turmoil all Summer. Her mother and father are going their separate ways. Natalia could stay living with Dad, or leave with Mom to a new life three hours’ drive away from Liberty. What’s more, she’s heard nothing during the Summer from Ethan Forrester, her closest friend throughout her years at Liberty. He’s just ignored her.

Natalia shares the narration of the chapters with Ethan, whose own home life is also miserable, since he knows his film/TV star Dad is cheating on his mother, and Ethan’s not even told her about it. He’s good-looking, modest, always affable, a star on Liberty’s basket-ball team. To his embarrassment, at the Prom which ended the preceding year, Ethan was elected Prom King – while still a Junior! – thus confirming the widely-shared view that Ethan was Definitely Hot. But not happy, since he has missed hanging out with Natalia during the vacation. Readers know more than the characters here, however, having read in the opening chapter that, after the Prom, Ethan and Natalia had been chatting in Ethan’s bed-room and had almost decided to fulfil the agreement they had made in their Freshman Year. They’d agreed then that when their Senior Year came round, if they were still virgins, they would try sex out with each other, just to see what it was like – more of an experiment than an experience. Better to check it out with someone you trusted than with some random partner you’d only just met. But that evening, readers know that each had misread the other, and things had ended in misunderstanding.

Almost all the plot develops through just one day – the day of the first major event of the year. The Senior Sunrise. This has traditionally taken place on a field at the school, but Natalia plans a sleepover camp close to the ocean. The traditional  highlight of the day involves all the students writing a letter exploring their ambitions for their final year – academic hopes, college choices, friendships, classmates, gender revelations, anything. No-one else reads the letters. These are placed in a large bottle and, later, ritually flung on a bonfire.

Now, utterly out of character, Natalia triggers a catastrophe which shapes the rest of the novel. Everyone else has headed for the beach, but as she is on her way to join them, she notices that the bottle, crammed with letters, stands unsealed on a table. She hadn’t found it easy to write her letter and had been reluctant to hand it in – now she can see it, close to the open mouth of the bottle. She decides to re-read it, but in extracting the letter she pulls out several more – and the breeze whisks some away into the undergrowth, others over the cliff towards the sea. She panics, but is joined in her hunt for the missing letters by Ethan, who had remained in his tent to change for the beach. Seven letters remain unfound; if they are discovered, Natalia’s standing with her classmates will be ruined. The one day time-span of the novel allows detailed observation of the ensuing confusions and arguments; but as readers follow the mounting tensions between the students, they may also become absorbed by the growth of a secure and gentle love as Natalia and Ethan clarify their misunderstandings and their feelings for each other.