The Story Behind Never Walk Alone by Willow Rose

By Willow Rose

While I wrote this book, we were all still in the middle of lockdown due to the Coronavirus or Covid19. If I had written this book at another time, before all this craziness happened to our world, it wouldn’t have been believable. But now, a lot of these things have become our reality: overwhelmed hospitals, lack of equipment to treat patients, people unable to say goodbye to their relatives, some of them having to do so on FaceTime, all of us being told to stay inside and not socialize. It has truly been a crazy time, unlike anything even I could have imagined.
What first inspired me to write this book about a new virus, slightly different from Covid19, was the story about patient zero in Italy who woke up after three weeks in a coma and had no idea what had happened and how many people he had infected, including his father, who had since died from the disease. The guilt must have been overwhelming. I just knew I had to write about a person who went through what he did, and so it became Harry’s sister, Reese’s story. If you want to know more, you can read about the Italian patient here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/04/italy-patient-one-family-coronavirus-covid19/610039/

You might wonder, why another virus story? Well, when I wanted to write another Harry Hunter book, I knew I couldn’t just write an ordinary thriller or mystery in a usual setting. Not with what was happening in the world. There was too much going on around me, and it felt bland—like it didn’t really matter. Somehow, I had to incorporate a virus into my story. I had to write about what I was going through, what we all were going through. I like to write about the world I am in, and this is our normal right now. Who even knows what normal will look like from now on? Hopefully, this won’t go on forever, and we’ll be able to get back to—if not our old normal, then a new normal—soon enough.

Willow Rose is the author of the new book Never Walk Alone.

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