'Leaving Time' by Jodi Picoult

Received from the Publisher

From the BLURB:

Alice Metcalf was a devoted mother, loving wife and accomplished scientist who studied grief among elephants. Yet it's been a decade since she disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind her small daughter, husband, and the animals to which she devoted her life. All signs point to abandonment - or worse. 

Still Jenna - now thirteen years old and truly orphaned by a father maddened by grief - steadfastly refuses to believe in her mother's desertion. So she decides to approach the two people who might still be able to help her find Alice: a disgraced psychic named Serenity Jones, and Virgil Stanhope, the cynical detective who first investigated her mother's disappearance and the strange, possibly linked death of one of her mother's coworkers. 

Together these three lonely souls will discover truths destined to forever change their lives. Deeply moving and suspenseful, Jodi Picoult's 21st novel is a radiant exploration of the enduring love between mothers and daughters.

Jenna Metcalf’s life should have been very different. She should have been raised at the Elephant Sanctuary that her father, Thomas, started and ran alongside her mother, Alice Metcalf; a brilliant scientist whose seminal work was on grief among elephants. Jenna should have been raised by the village behind the sanctuary, fellow keepers Nevvie, Grace and Gideon. Jenna should have been raised to be her mother’s shadow, the little miniature of her with pink Converse shoes and a bright mane of red hair.

Instead Jenna’s childhood was railroaded when she was just a baby, and never got back on course. At thirteen she now lives with her guardian grandmother because her father is institutionalised and her mother disappeared a decade ago after the trampling death of a fellow keeper at her parent’s sanctuary. But Jenna has never stopped hoping that her mother is alive, and that her cold case will lead to a missing person who has either forgotten about her past life or has been searching as desperately for Jenna as she has for her mother. 

So Jenna is employing the help of two unlikely people – once internationally renowned television psychic (with a high success rate) Serenity Jones has been out of the public eye for a number of years, ever since her psychic abilities dried up after a disastrous child abduction case. Then there’s Virgil Stanhope, the detective who worked the elephant sanctuary death case and still feels partly responsible for Alice Metcalf’s disappearance. 

This unlikely trio will set out to answer Jenna’s most burning question once and for all – what happened to her mother?

‘Leaving Time’ is the new novel from Jodi Picoult.

I had so been looking forward to this novel – I am a huge Jodi Picoult fan, and proudly display her backlist on my bookshelf. I’d count ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ and ‘The Pact’ among my most enjoyable reads of the last decade, and last year I thoroughly enjoyed her novel ‘The Storyteller’. I classify Jodi Picoult as one of my ‘tried and true’ authors – I know I’m going to get suckered into her novels, and I rarely care how outlandish the storylines are because I enjoy the journey so very much. So I’m a little bit heavy-hearted to report that ‘Leaving Time’ wasn’t the steadfast read I’d been hoping for …

The story is told from four perspectives. Jenna Metcalf is the precocious thirteen-year-old narrator, admittedly too smart for her own good and so unlike the other kids in her class that she’s often labelled a freak. Jenna’s voice does feel out of touch with her age, but we can assume that the traumatic history around losing her mother (and, in many ways, her father) has left her a wise and scarred old soul in the body of this adolescent;

I know that I used to be a girl whose hair was strawberry blond, who ran around like a wild thing while my mother took endless notes about the elephants. Now I’m a kid who is too serious for her age and too smart for her own good. And yet as impressive as I am with scientific statistics, I fail miserably when it comes to real-life facts, like knowing that Wanelo is a website and now a hot new band. It eighth grade is a microcosm of the social hierarchy of the human adolescent (and to my mother, it certainly would have been), then reciting fifty named elephant herds in the Tuli Block of Botswana cannot compete with identifying all the members of One Direction.

Jenna pours over her mother’s old scientific research on elephants, and it’s in these segues that we also get first-person narration from Alice Metcalf explaining her life’s work – studying grief among elephants, how she came to this thesis working in Botswana where she met Thomas Metcalf and made the journey with him back to America to work at his sanctuary and marry him, after discovering she was pregnant after a one-night stand in Africa. Alice is narrating the events and circumstances leading up to her disappearance, all of her chapters are set in the past and hurtling towards a terrible night that Jenna is still reeling from the repercussions of.

“Ten years isn’t a cold case, it’s an ice trail. There’s nothing still here now that existed back when your mother disappeared.” 

“I’m here,” I say. 

Then we have Virgil and Serenity – each carrying their own demons and personal reasons for helping young Jenna sift through the sands of the past to get to the truth. 

“I used to think I saw my mom all the time,” I say softly. “I’d be in a crowded place and I’d let go of my grandma’s hand and start running toward her, but I was never able to catch up.” 

Serenity is staring at me with a strange look on her face. “Maybe you are psychic.”  

“Or maybe missing someone and finding someone have the same symptoms,” I say. 

There’s a lot going on in ‘Leaving Time’, but that’s not unusual for Picoult who prefers multiple narrators and stringing loose threads together to make an intricate pattern. The pattern of ‘Leaving Time’ is not hard to discern either; elephants, memory and grieving, with heady doses of the matriarchy/ allmothering aspects of elephant life – the mother/child connection. And that’s what worked the most for me – the research into elephant memory, particularly relating to traumatic events.

Picoult, through Alice, does write beautifully and tenderly about elephants – from their grieving process to a mother’s patience for her calf and the way a herd plays together. These descriptions are gorgeous, and even without reading Picoult’s acknowledgements at the back of the book (where she cites the work of people like ‘Elephant Whisperer’ Lawrence Anthony) and speaks about ivory trade, I’d know how deeply moved she was in the process of researching these animals for this book. 

It was the human connections that were harder for me to enjoy. Indeed, it wasn’t until halfway through this book that I even felt I was semi-hooked, interested in Jenna’s story and how it would all end. Where Picoult in the past has drawn readers in with moralistic “what would you do?” premises, ‘Leaving Time’ felt murkier for leaving readers out of such conundrums – we’re very much along for the Alice/Jenna ride, and little is asked of what we’d do in their shoes – which is so often how Picoult’s books work.

**MAJOR SPOILER – do not read until you’ve finished the book – but I can’t write a review without saying it** highlight to read 

[I guessed the ‘twist’ about 100 pages out from the end. And I was guessing in a “oh, I hope that isn’t what she’s been doing here…” kind of way. Because, let’s be honest, M. Night Shyamalan and ‘The Sixth Sense’ have spoiled that twist for everyone – I think it will cross a lot of people’s minds because by now it’s not really a twist at all. It’s been played, and it felt that way in ‘Leaving Time’ I’m sorry to say.]

I felt a disconnection in this book, and maybe that’s me missing some of my favourite Picoult staples: heart-warming (though complicated) romance, courtroom drama and moral grey-area. ‘Leaving Time’ was okay, but I’m used to being consumed by a Jodi Picoult book instead of the limp-along way I read her latest.

3/5

'The Storyteller' by Jodi Picoult

Received from the Publisher 

From the BLURB:

Sage Singer is a young woman who has been damaged by her past. Her solitary night work as a baker allows her to hide from the world and focus her creative energies on the beautiful bread she bakes.

Yet she finds herself striking up an unlikely friendship. Josef Weber is a quiet, grandfatherly man, well respected in the community; everyone's favourite retired teacher and Little League coach.

One day he asks Sage for a favour: to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses.

Then Josef tells her that he deserves to die - and why.

What do you do when evil lives next door? Can someone who's committed horrendous acts ever truly redeem themselves? Is forgiveness yours to offer if you aren't the person who was wronged? And most of all - if Sage even considers his request - would it be murder, or justice?

Grief is meant to come in stages, but for Sage Singer, her mother’s death is a lingering torment that has turned her into a recluse. She has no contact with her two sisters; sure they blame her for their mother’s death. She has taken a graveyard-shift job at Our Daily Bread, baking with her grandmother’s recipes. And she has become tangled in a love affair with a married man - their relationship a convenient hide-away from the rest of the world. 

Now, Sage attends a grief group to work through her pain. It is here that she meets Josef Weber – an elderly man, popular in the community, who is trying to cope with his widowhood since his wife’s passing. The two strike up an unlikely friendship – and fall into a routine of nightly meetings at Our Daily Bread, where they talk and find comfort in one another.

But then Josef asks a favour of Sage – something so horrible, it sends her reeling and questioning if he had ulterior motives all along … Because Josef wants Sage to kill him. 

Josef reasons that he is an old, healthy man and his death is taking too long without someone to help him end things. And, of course, he deserves to die. Because Josef was once a member of the SS-Panzergrenadier-Division Totenkopf – a division of the Nazi Waffen-SS. 

Now Sage questions all of Josef’s kindly words, his easy friendship with her. He has come to Sage, of the only Jewish family in their predominantly Anglo-community, to end his life and beg forgiveness for past sins. Sins, Sage can barely begin to comprehend – but her grandmother can. 

Sage’s grandmother, Minka, was a Holocaust survivor. A Polish Jew, she lived in the ghettos with her family during the war, but it wasn’t long before tragedy struck and Minka’s family was ruined … and then she was put on a train to Auschwitz.

Confused and angered by Josef’s confession and his audacious request, Sage begins the lengthy process of finding someone to report him to – and she is eventually directed to the FBI, and Leo Stein of the Justice Department. It is Leo’s job to hunt down War Criminals of World War II, and bring them to justice. But he is racing against time – many of the Nazi party are either dead or dying, and all have been so deep in hiding for so many years… running from their corrupted pasts. 

‘The Storyteller’ is the new novel by Jodi Picoult.

Oradour-sur-Glane was a small commune in west-central France. On June 10, 1944 a German Waffen-SS company tore through the village, massacring 642 of its inhabitants and leaving very few survivors. All women and children were herded into the town’s Church while soldiers looted. The men, meanwhile, were led to six barns where machine guns were already in place; soldiers shot at legs first, not killing the villagers, but wounding them so they could not escape. They then set the barns and church on fire – anyone who tried to flee through the windows and doors met with machine-gun fire.

Oradour-sur-Glane remains one of the worst massacres of the Second World War – so horrendous was the destruction of this town, that a new village was built on a nearby site, and French president, Charles de Gaulle, declared the original village be maintained as a permanent memorial and museum. And the ruins remain, to be remembered.  

In 1953 there was a tribunal into the surviving 65 of the 200 German soldiers involved in the massacre. But the trial was a complex one, for the nationalities and ethnicities of the soldiers involved, and refusals to extradite. More trials were conducted in 1958 and 1983. And, just this year, it has been announced that German investigators have again opened a new inquiry into the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre after new evidence was uncovered in the archived files of Germany’s Stasi Secret Police. 

I mention Oradour-sur-Glane because (as with all Picoult stories) a central conundrum touched upon in ‘The Storyteller’ is whether or not Josef deserves to be punished, and if he can/should be forgiven for his past sins - just as many question whether too much time has passed for another investigation into the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre. 

One of the best scenes that addresses this thought-provoking issue is between Leo and a blind-date – a woman who doesn’t really ‘get’ what Leo does for a living, or why it’s such a big deal to jail these old guys who did wrong years ago. Leo’s fiery explanation is a stand-out; 

“The Nazis didn’t just target Jews. They also killed Gypsies and Poles and homosexuals and the mentally and physically disabled. Everyone should be invested in what my department does. Because if we’re not, what message is America sending to people who commit genocide? That they can get away with it, if enough time passes? They can hide inside our borders without even a slap on the wrist? We routinely deport hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens every year whose sole offence is that they overstayed a visa or came without the right paperwork – but people who were involved in crimes against humanity get to stay? And die peacefully here? And be buried on American soil?”

I think it should also be thought about in a modern-context. Think if Osama Bin Laden hadn’t been found and killed in 2011. I imagine you could have asked any American – 10, 20, 30 years since 9/11 – if the US Government should still expend forces to hunt him down, and they would have answered with a resounding ‘yes’. Now I think of the few survivors of the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre, nearly 70 years later, and they still speak of waiting for justice. And I can understand why. 

This question of redemption/forgiveness is a central focus of ‘The Storyteller’ – made even more complex when Picoult spends the entire middle of the novel in Minka’s point-of-view, first in the Jewish ghetto and then during her harrowing time at Auschwitz. Minka is, undoubtedly, the most compelling of all the narratives in the book – and by comparison the contemporary voices of Josef, Leo and Sage sometimes felt undercooked. 

Also interspersed throughout the book is the unfolding story that Minka had been writing since she was a young girl, dreaming of being a novelist. It is a tale of vampires and monsters, and as Minka revisited the story after surviving Auschwitz, it became an allegory for the real horrors and beasts she faced down. I will say that this was a part of the book that didn’t work for me – it became one of too many voices, between Josef, Minka, Leo, Sage and then this third-person story heaped on top. I would have preferred if Picoult had spent more time in the present, with Minka speaking to her granddaughter – though I understand that talking about her time in the War was too hard, so she gave Sage her story as a compensation of sorts. It was still one narrative too many. 

I also think Picoult spent too much time in the present with Josef and Sage at the beginning of the book. I think it would have been more impacting to spend time with them after we’d heard Minka’s story of survival. Then I think it could have been really interesting to read Sage grapple with her family history, and her own spirituality. She often remarks that she’s Jewish, but does not practice Judaism. But since Josef’s confession, and her asking questions of Minka, Sage starts to understand why her father always thought it was important that his children retain their religion; 

To me, it seemed they were following an abridged version of Judaism, so who were they to tell me tell me how and what to believe? I said this to me parents when I was lobbying to not have a bat mitzvah. My father got very quiet. The reason it’s important to believe in something, he said, is because you can. 

I also wish we’d spent more time with Josef at the end, rather than the beginning. I can see that Picoult wanted to lull Sage, and readers, into a false sense of him – as this sweet, old man – but we’re not surprised to discover his Nazi past, because it’s there in the blurb. We know what’s coming, and the drawn-out curveball of his confession is missing much punch. It would have actually been better if Picoult had kept the majority of present-day in the latter half of the story, rather than the beginning. I think it could have been much more hard-hitting to have to read Sage grapple with her ‘friendship’ with Josef if it had come after readers know of Minka’s awful Auschwitz story. 

I know that Picoult changed her US publishers last year – and ‘The Storyteller’ is her first book under a new imprint. Undoubtedly Picoult wants to push away from her oft-inappropriate ‘chick-lit’ label and accusations of formulaic writing. I won’t say that ‘The Storyteller’ is the best book to address the Holocaust or survivor stories. I actually think books by Morris Gleitzman, Suzy Zail and Ruta Sepetys (all released in the last couple of years) have been better. But Picoult does well to prod at current questions of guilt, forgiveness and accountability (as proven by the recent reopening of the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre case). And ‘The Storyteller’ is even more hard-hitting for the many wars raging now – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. . .  what Picoult does is remind us that history keeps repeating itself, and the hunt for culprits of WWII is still as relevant as those wars being fought right now, when authorities will eventually turn an eye to prosecuting those who acted outside of the Geneva convention and basic humanity. 

‘The Storyteller’ is also the best Picoult book of recent years – and the first one I've managed to read through (actually, I read it in 2 days!) and it feels closer to her better, old self. 

4/5 

'Sing You Home' by Jodi PICOULT

Received from the Publisher

From the BLURB:

Zoe Baxter has spent ten years trying to have a baby, and finally it looks as though her dream is about to come true - she is seven months pregnant. But a terrible turn of events takes away her baby and breaks apart her marriage to Max. In the aftermath she throws herself into her career as a music therapist. When Vanessa, a guidance counsellor, asks Zoe to work with a suicidal teen, Vanessa and Zoe's relationship moves from business to friendship and then, to Zoe's surprise, blossoms into love.

When Zoe allows herself to start thinking of having a family again, she remembers that she and Max still have frozen embryos they never used. Max, meanwhile, has found peace at the bottom of a bottle, until he is redeemed by an evangelical church where the pastor has vowed to fight the 'homosexual agenda' that threatens traditional family values. This mission becomes personal for Max when Zoe and her partner want permission to raise his unborn child.

Sing You Home is an honest and moving story of contemporary relationships and the consequences of love and desire colliding with science and the law. From tragedy to self-discovery and joy, Zoe, Vanessa and Max will realise the undeniable truth - that you can't choose who you love.

Zoe and Max have been trying to have a baby for nine years. Nine years of needles and medicine, IVF treatments and fifteen-thousand dollar injections that don’t work. Nine years until Zoe is the closest she has ever been to becoming a mother . . . 28 weeks pregnant and it looks as though nine years of trying will finally pay off . . . until it doesn’t, and Zoe has a stillborn.

Max has had enough. His wife is forty-years-old now, the wrong side of statistics for successful IVF treatments. He doesn’t want to try for heartbreak anymore. He doesn’t want to try for a baby, and he doesn’t want to try for Zoe either. So he files for divorce.

While Max finds answers at the bottom of a bottle, Zoe trudges through her life believing she has lost her last chance for a baby. And then she meets Vanessa. Vanessa is a school counsellor who has employed Zoe as a music therapist . . . and then she becomes Zoe’s best friend. And then she becomes the one person Zoe can’t live without.

Max drank to forget and to feel. Max drank, and almost killed himself – until Jesus saved him. After a near-death experience, Max is welcomed into the fold of the Eternal Glory Church. Max is born again, and he can see the mistakes he made with Zoe. Mistakes he vows to never make again, now that Jesus is his personal lord and savior.

Zoe and Vanessa are in love, and they want a family. It doesn’t matter that the state of Massachusetts doesn’t recognize their marital status, or that Zoe has never felt more targeted than when she walks down the street holding Vanessa’s hand. They want a family, because they know they have love to give. So when Zoe suggests using her and Max’s remaining three frozen embryos, it seems motherhood is within reach for her once more.

But if Zoe can claim the embryos are hers by biological right, then Max can claim the same. And Max steadfastly believes that Jesus Christ does not want his deviant ex-wife to raise his children in a house of homosexual sin.

I always have to prepare myself for a Jodi Picoult book. Because I know what will happen while I read one of her novels – I will be turned into a blubbering mess as I read vicariously and viscerally about the characters. I know that Jodi Picoult books are mostly formulaic – take a water-cooler issue; leave it to simmer and hit close to home, then sprinkle with a little courtroom drama for a finishing touch. I know this, and yet Picoult gets me every time! Without fail, I will find myself hiccup-crying throughout her books and muttering insults and “oh my gawd's!” through the reading. And she does it to me again in ‘Sing You Home’. . .

The first-half of the book follows Zoe and Max through the stillborn birth of their IVF baby, a tragedy that proves to be the final straw that breaks their nine-year marriage. Picoult’s exploration of IVF and the couples who navigate the peaks and valleys of infertility treatments is interesting in itself.

Picoult writes about infertility from the perspective of the husband. Max has a low sperm count, and when coupled with Zoe’s own infertility issues the pair spend their nine-year marriage in and out of fertility clinics, ruled by Zoe’s ovulation and bankrupted by expensive IVF treatments ($15,000 a pop!). Mostly when infertility is mentioned it’s to the sympathies of the mother who can’t conceive. After all, what is more natural and womanly than childbirth? The very yardstick by which society measures a woman’s femininity and worth. Picoult observes how all-consuming the baby race can be as Zoe admits to letting pregnant friends fall by the way-side out of spite and jealousy over her own inability to conceive. Until, nine years later, Zoe and Max are wholly-consumed by their baby needs. All what’s left in their marriage is scheduled-injections and money crunching for more treatments.

“That’s all I've ever wanted,” I say, as soon as we are alone again. “To have a baby.”

“What if it’s not what I want?”

“It’s what you used to want.”

“Well, you used to want a relationship with me,” Max says, “so I guess we’ve both changed a little.”

“What are you talking about? I still want a relationship with you.”

“You want a relationship with my sperm. This . . . this baby thing . . . it’s gotten so much bigger than the two of us. It’s not even us, in it together anymore. It’s you, and it’s the baby we can’t seem to have, and the harder it gets the more air it sucks out of the room, Zoe. There’s no space left for me.”

Picoult delves in Max’s mindset, at being unable to impregnate his wife. The humiliation of having to fill up a plastic cup and walk into a clinic where everyone knows what goes on behind closed doors. More than that, Max articulates the seemingly overwhelming emphasis that society places on fertility and reproduction. And she raises some interesting points;

Even the sex symbol celebrities who make women swoon, like David Beckham and Brad Pitt and Hugh Jackman, are always in ‘People’ magazine swinging one of their children onto their shoulders. (I should know; I've read nearly every issue in the waiting room of the IVF clinic.) This may be the twenty-first century, but being a real man in still tied to being able to procreate.

All of this is very interesting, and heartbreaking, but not terribly Picoult-esque. Anyone who has read a Picoult book knows that she thrives in the gray areas – her stories burst to life with contentions and tensions. And so I spent the first-half of ‘Sing You Home’ wondering where the drama lay in the heartbreak.

. . . And then Zoe falls in love with a woman, while Max is ‘born again’. Zoe wants to use the embryos she and Max created to get her new wife pregnant.

Ah, there’s that drama!

As the story begins and Zoe miscarries, only to be divorced by her husband, she seems sure to be the wronged party. Readers (the majority of whom will be female) may think the story black and white, Max malicious and Zoe wounded. But Jodi Picoult is best for her shades of gray. She doesn’t give her readers an easy out; her characters are neither heroes nor villains, and she refuses to write situations that have clear paths and obvious conclusions. At least, this is where Picoult normally excels.

I will admit that in ‘Sing You Home’ Picoult is heavy-handed with the religious right. She does portray them as hate-mongers and uneducated bible-thumpers. By contrast, Zoe and Vanessa are two smart, caring and witty young women (a school counselor and music therapist who works with burn victims and abused children, respectively). ‘Sing You Home’ is one of the few Picoult books that occasionally lapses into shades of black and white. . . Admittedly, I am one of those who think that religion has no right to say who anyone should love, let alone marry. I support gay marriage (and wish that Julia Gillard did too). But even I thought that Picoult was painting a very villainous picture of religion in this book.

If reading Jodi Picoult has taught me anything, it’s that there are never just two sides to a story – there’s more like twenty-two. But in ‘Sing You Home’ Picoult seems reluctant to write beyond the open-minded GLAAD (The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and evilly close-minded religious right.

I missed Picoult’s trademark unbiased writing when it came to the politics in ‘Sing You Home’. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t sucker-punch my emotions while reading this book. As always with a Picoult book, I learnt a little something – about IVF treatments, the legal standing of gay couples in America and the religious foundations that inform ‘right to life’ campaigns. I blubbered, I power-read in one day and I definitely intend to pass this book on to friends and family... Picoult may have a formula, but it’s a winning formula to be sure!

4/5