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Writing "Wish You Well" was a work of love for its auther, David Baldacci, whose family was from the Appalachian Mountains. The book in itself is fiction, but the setting for the story and the age-old story of survival is not. Based on stories handed down as a child, the author's mother was interviewed for the writing of "Wish You Well", bringing both the author and his mother very close together.

The story begins when author Jack Cardinal dies in a car wreck with his wife ending up in a coma. Both young children survive, but the young daughter blames her mother for the wreck. With nobody in the family left to care for them, she informs legal authorities she has only a great grand-mother in the Appalachioan Mountains. Of course, they are immediately shipped to Louise Cardinal's farm at the top of the mountains with the young mother still in a coma brought in an ambulance.

When they arrive by train at the bottom of the mountain, a colored man by the name of Eugene picks them up --- a man who does not speak to them at all. Traveling a long ways in silence, they head up the hill on a dangerous single path dirt road which seems to take forever. When they arrive to the old-fashioned farm which is very old, they are greeted by an elderly woman who is young Lou's namesake, her father's grandmother.

Swearing to not like the farm and thinking of leaving it as soon as possible, the years pass by with the young children becoming friends with Eugene and elderly Louise. Learning to love the mountain area, they help run the farm which has no electricity or heat other than cole and candles. But every day they become part of the land, loving it and slowly respecting it from the bottom of their heart.

With their mother still in a coma, the young boy Oz prays daily for his mother to come back to life. A young lawyer friend of elderly Louise comes to read to her every night, also hoping the young mother will awaken. But the family begins to have trouble when the conniving gas companies attempt to take over Louise's land, feeling they have a chance when the elderly woman has a stroke on the night their old barn mysteriously burns down.