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Ross Wakeman is a damaged man. Physically, he seems indestructible, having survived several near-death experiences, but when his fiancee died, and he survived, in a car crash 8 years ago, the guilt and pain of his loss overwhelmed him. Most of those near-death experiences were self- induced, attempts to reconnect with his lost love. Now, still trying to connect, he's hooked up with a spiritualist - who, he is about to find out, is just another charlatan. Disgusted, he quits and goes to visit his sister Shelby, who lives in a small town in Vermont, with her 9 year old son Ethan, a child with a rare and very debilitating physical disorder. Odd things are happening in this town: rose petals rain from the sky, the ground in one area is frozen solid, though it is August, peculiar things appear and disappear, people behave oddly and don't know why. Ross decides to try once more to connect with the "other side", and in the process meets a mysterious young woman who comes and goes unpredictably. I "read" this book on tape, which was pleasant in some ways, but I found the initial sequences of the book, in which several characters are introduced one at a time in separate vignettes, to be a little confusing. By the time I'd met a few of them, I was losing track of who was who and what they were all doing. Had I a text in hand, I would have leafed back through, but this is less easily done in the taped book format. Eventually, all the characters become sufficiently well-known to the reader that confusion is no longer an issue, but I have a feeling I missed a few clues from those introductions. I was only mildly interested in the beginning section of this book - briefly described in my opening paragraph. However, the second section (there are three all together), where our story jumps back in time to 1932, I found quite rivetting. Here we meet a very young, pregnant woman, Cecilia Pike, who is clearly close to a mental breakdown. She is daughter and wife to two men who are deeply involved in the eugenics movement of the period. These men are pillars of the community and very influential. They are fiercely convinced that they can identify the roots of wickedness in individuals and root it out of the world by preventing such individuals from procreating. By a strange coincidence, all such individuals are poor, and of Indian, "foreign" or mixed blood. Picoult does an excellent job of delineating these ideas, and the blind sincerity of their proponents, without becoming in the least polemical or losing sight of the story she is telling. Cecilia's story is very compelling and her death (this is not a spoiler, we know about it from the start) very affecting, while leaving many questions still unanswered. The third section weaves the two stories together, cleverly tying up all loose ends and connecting all the people we've been following from the start with a satisfying inevitability. Picoult also draws a delicate and thoughtful comparison between the eugenics "science" of the 1930's and modern genetic science, again without taking sides or waving any placards. I found this book well worth the reading - or listening, in my case.
Reviewed by Diana Sandberg, August 2003
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