|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Strange, paranormal things are happening in the town of Comtosook, Vermont. Ever since elderly Spencer Pike sold his late wifeıs land to land developer, Rod van Vlee, for a strip mall, the world is turning upside down. Rose petals fall from the sky like snow, the ground freezes in the middle of August, and the rain that falls looks like blood only to dry into a red powder, and even the food tastes wrong. More trouble comes when the Abenaki Indians, a tribe that the US Government refuses to recognize as a true Indian group because of lapses in their history, comes to believe that the property is a sacred Abenaki burial ground. They picket the site and all construction work stops. Thatıs when a retired ghost hunter, Ross Wakeman, is hired by the developer to discover what is wrong at the site and hopefully to clear away any unhappy spirits. Within the first pages of this book we will meet approximately eleven main point of view characters and learn about their unhappy histories and lives. There's the old and dying man who sells the land, Spencer Pike, thereıs the unhappy strip mall developer, Rod van Vlee and the ghost hunter he hires, Ross Wakeman, who is still searching for the spirit of his lost love Amiee who died in a car crash; his sister Shelby and her nine year old son, Ethan, who suffers from a rare genetic disorder, xeroderma pigmentosum. Then, from the past we meet Spencer Pikeıs wife Cecilia and her maid Ruby. Back in the present we meet Rubyıs granddaughter, Dr. Meredith Oliver of Maryland and her eight year old daughter Lucy, who sees dead people. We also get to learn all about Eli Rochert, one of two full time police officers in Comtosook. And last but not least we learn all about Az, the centenarian Abenaki Indian who knows more about everything than heıs saying. Sound confusing? Now you understand the first problem with this book. Too many lead characters and too much information about too many people. How can the readers feel for anybody when theyıre asked to get to know more people in this book than most people know in real life? SECOND GLANCE by Jodi Picoult is long and drawn out and needs itıs middle section, dealing with Lia Beaumount, to be cut down drastically. Oh, did you notice that Lia Beaumontıs name wasnıt mentioned when I listed the eleven main characters of this book? That because two of the characters are also referred to by three different names. The reason is that the author needed to have an easy misdirection to keep the readers from unraveling the mystery part of the story way, way before anyone inside the book does. Jodi Picoult also used difficult and emotional issues such as suicide, self injury, and eugenics as a too easy button to get sympathy for her whiny characters. George Guidall narrates this ten cassette, seventeen hour long audio recording of this novel. Mr. Guidall does a fine job. He endows most of the characters with a unique voice and you can differentiate between characters with little problem. He manages to make the examples of the Abenaki language sounds authentic, and he captured the perfect, annoying whine of the female main character of the middle section of the book. SECOND GLANCE starts with a lot of characters and follows many different storylines, and unfortunately at the end, Picoult wraps them all up by knitting them together in a most implausible manner. If you pay close attention to the way the book ends, youıll note that it unfolds an ending that disproves the story that came before it. After sitting through over seventeen hours and ten plodding audio cassettes, you wind up with a novel that makes no sense. On the rare occasion when Ms. Picoult includes some dialogue between characters, we see how well she can write, but since most of the book is long, drawn-out inner monologues of self-doubt and woe-is-me reflections, I didnıt get to enjoy much of it. If you donıt pay much attention to what you read, and if the plotline doesnıt have to make sense, and if good sounding but meaningless similes (as white as a miracle, as sad as a canyon, as smooth as a secret) donıt make you think twice about the worth of a book, by all means then SECOND GLANCE is for you. But, for the rest of us who pay attention to details, such as the writer keeping the dates of charactersı deaths straight in the storyline; for readers who find it strange that the author makes the effort to quote authentic facts about how the Eugenics movement affected people in America, but forgets to mention how other important real world occurrences such as how the Great Depression might have touched people living in 1932; and for readers who find fault when Ms. Picoult permits death to not end the lives of just some of her characters, well then, I urge those readers not to give Second Glance a secondıs glance.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, August 2003
This book has more than one review. Click here to show all.
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
