Are you ready to read fiction set during Covid?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

Watership Down, more bunnies dying.

Very adult book that.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Very adult book that.

Bright Eyes is one of my wife's favorite songs.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Catlady

Now, that kind of content warning would help. I just finished a charming book that featured a wonderful dog; while the dog is not the focus of the story, he got into a couple of dicey situations where I was thinking, Oh no, oh no. But the dog was OK.

Yeah, I'm with you. I can relate to the motivation in movies like Shooter, and, more famously, John Wick, where the lead character goes on a revenge rampage because (in part) someone killed their dog, but you have the catch-22 of having to have the dog die in the movie to get that motivation, which sucks.

My son and I just watched "Prey" this week (a prequel to "Predator"). It opens with scenes of the heroine and her dog. My son said "if the dog dies, I'm not watching anymore."

I also recently read two different, unrelated mystery novels, by different authors, both parts of long, ongoing, usually one-book-per-year series, BOTH of which left the lead character AND THEIR DOG in a life-or-death cliff hanger, then the authors BOTH took multi-year breaks before the next book in the series.
What's up with that?! If I had been reading these books when they were new, I'd never have read either of those authors again! Even now, when the following books are all available, I'm tempted to boycott them for the heck of it.

As for the original topic, like others, I'm not interested in reading about the pandemic (and I'm rarely a fan of "ripped from the headlines" plots in general) but I'm OK if novels set in the real world acknowledge it. I'd find it hard to suspend disbelief if they ignored it.
As it happens I just read a Brad Thor novel that came out just a couple years before the pandemic, and the plot included a pandemic that had eerie similarities. I had to double-check the publication date.

ApK

[Sirtel]

For me the abuse of ANY animal, bird, fish, snake... is a big no-no. It doesn't have to be a pet. The species doesn't matter. Well, I can live with an occasional swatting of a mosquito or a cockroach, but deliberate, groundless abuse of even insects turns me instantly off the book.

I wasn't so hypersensitive when I was young. I guess it's a result of working in a shelter for stray cats for many years.

[Catlady]

I have just finished a domestic suspense book that, unbeknownst to me from reading the blurb, turned out to be set firmly during the early days of the pandemic in NYC: The Darkness of Others, by Cate Holahan.

This was an example of how not to write about the pandemic. While I wouldn't call it exploitation, covid was mostly a pointless distraction, only connected to one element of the plot (a restaurant failure, that, while an important element, could have happened without covid). There seemed to be endless references to face masks, social distancing, and other precautions. It felt as if the author had written a first draft of a standard domestic thriller, then decided to shoehorn the pandemic into the story. Really weird.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Catlady

While I wouldn't call it exploitation, covid was mostly a pointless distraction

This brings to me a book I recently read and I’m going to add a corollary for non-fiction and historical fiction. The book, The Facemaker, was a disappointing account of plastic surgery during the Great War and toward the end the author included a potted account of the Spanish flu — which was entirely irrelevant to the issue of plastic surgery to repair battle damage, but was obviously meant to tie it into current events.

So it doesn’t even have to be Covid per se, but an account of any plague or pandemic, a kind of poorly disguised exploitation, especially when as with Catlady’s and my books, it’s as she said, “shoehorn[ed]” in. I’m belaboring the obvious, but it’s annoying.