|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Jodi Picoult (Songs of the Humpback Whale, Harvesting the Heart, Picture Perfect, Mercy, The Pact, Keeping Faith, Plain Truth Salem Falls , Perfect Match) began writing when she was still studying. The success of her short stories encouraged her to work at something longer and Songs Of The Humpback Whale, written when she was pregnant (I wonder if the title reflected her self-image at that time - I can't have been the only pregnant woman to think she looked more like a whale than a human, surely) was released in 1992. Picoult has the ability to engage her readers' attention and make them care what happens to her protagonists. At the heart of all her works one can find a concentration on love and human relationships. Despite this aspect, I have yet to find any instance of her work becoming sentimental and sloshy. Second Glance is an intricate novel. A lot of research has gone into the book. Picoult has studied the less than uplifting history of the laws of Vermont which, quite incredibly, reflected the eugenics experiments of the first half of the twentieth century. Respectable geneticists criticised Hitler yet indulged in their own practices of 'purifying' the human race. Picoult has mingled such a thread with the Native American struggle for land rights and the disease of xeroderma pigmentosum. Oh yes, and then there are the paranormal aspects of the tale. I try never to read the blurb of a book - they are notoriously misleading, frequently causing me to wonder, when I read a blurb subsequent to reading the novel it purports to describe, if I have read the same book as the blurb writer - in order not to have it colour my perceptions of what the book is about. Had I been told the subjects of this novel prior to reading it, I would probably have laid it aside and gone on to what I would have considered more interesting topics. In this narrative, however, Picoult has also combines the wrenching and overwhelming love mothers have for their children as well as the love adults have for each other and that which humans have for the land. Ross Wakeman lost his lover in a car accident. He pulled her from the wreck of their car then went to rescue the driver of another car which was threatening to explode. His fianceé died while the other driver survived. Ross suffers various incidents which would, to another human, prove fatal. He has emerged from all, including lightning strike and wrist cutting, relatively unscathed. He believes he cannot die so is doomed to be separated from his lost love, Aimée, forever. In a frantic attempt to discover if she may be chained to the earth as a ghost, Ross becomes a paranormal investigator. After discovering the perfidy of his employer, Ross ceases his professional employment and goes to live with his sister, Shelby, and her son Ethan, a sufferer of XP which is likely to claim the child's life if he becomes exposed to sunlight. Ethan understands he will die before a normal boy would and hero-worships his daredevil uncle, not understanding why Ross would seek death. The Abenaki are a Native American tribe who are protesting the sale of land which is, they claim, the burial ground of members of their tribe. Ross seeks out the centenarian elder and learns something of their history. In the meantime, all unsought, he encounters the first instance of a genuine haunting he has ever experienced. Meredith Oliver is a geneticist, at the same time reviled by certain groups while attempting to give childless couples the opportunity to parent healthy children. She, like Ross' sister Shelby, is a single parent. Lucy, Meredith's daughter, unlike Ethan, does not have an obvious disease. Her disability is more subtle - she sees ghosts. Spencer Pike, formerly a geneticist studying and promoting eugenics, lives in a nursing home. He has sold the land formerly belonging to his wife, to a developer and it is around this development - and the mysterious overnight reconstituting of a demolished house - that the Abenaki protest centres. Pike's wife, Cecilia, was killed in 1932. She was hanged, yet there was nowhere for her to have stood in order to reach the rafter from which she was suspended. Also, there were scratch marks where she had tried to free herself from the noose. Who had caused her death so many years previously? Policeman Eli undertakes to solve that mystery as well as the modern day mysteries. The tale, with all its emotional elements, is incredibly involving. Picoult is the mistress of the engrossing tale. She writes well and comprehensibly yet manages to engage her readers' interest throughout with never-flagging action. I anticipate her next book with great pleasure.
Reviewed by Denise Wels, October 2003
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
|
