Oh Jodi. I keep trying. I want you back. I want the Jodi Picoult of The Pact and Plain Truth. I want you to back off on the research and immerse yourself in the characters. That's what I love about you. The two families from The Pact are etched in my brain. The Amish mother and daughter in Plain Truth are still with me years after my initial reading. I can't speak for everyone, but for me, the "issues" in your books are intriquing and thought-provoking when they are an integral part of the development of the characters and their relationships, not when they seem to be the reason for the characters and their relationships.
My 15 year old daughter Haley (she actually turns 15 in June...she will be so delighted if she reads this and sees that I have promoted her early) was on a Picoult binge when Change of Heart came out. So we picked it up on one of our surgical strikes on Quail Ridge Books. (I was just there yesterday and came away with seven books that when viewed in a stack were the definition of eclectic.) It moved between her floor and mine for a while. Then I found myself in need of a regular novel with a plot. I was surrounded by memoirs, anthologies and the occasional muckraking diatribe on some social ill.
I never loved it. By the end I did feel compelled to finish it. To see how it ended. But there is a huge difference between being compelled to finish a book to see what happens and not being able to put a book down because you are emotionally connected with the characters and the subject matter. It's the latter that I know Jodi Picoult is capable of...which makes it all the more frustrating to read her more recent books.
A tragic combination of circumstances robs a woman of her husband, her child and her second husband and leaves a man on death row awaiting execution by lethal injection for the crime. Her second child, born after her second husband died (it's really, really tragic) is in the hospital slowly dying from a congenital heart defect and awaiting a donor heart. I won't go further into the plot so as not to spoil it for potential readers.
The story involves and is told from the variousl perspectives of a prison inmate suffering from HIV, the mother, a priest and an ACLU attorney. I know. It kind of sounds like the beginning of a long and complicated joke. And speaking of jokes...I loved this paragraph which was incidental to the story, but so true. At one point in the book, a priest and a rabbi are talking (sounds like a joke, right...well, it is) and the rabbi says:
Jesus was a Jewish man after all. Just look at the evidence: he lived at home, went into his Dad's business, thought his mother was a virgin and his mother thought he was God.
So the plot revolves around religious issues, the death penalty and to some degree the politics of organ transplants. The prison scenes become a little too Green Mile-esque for my taste. Picoult actually references The Green Mile at one point, so it is by no means stealing the idea. But King did it well. (Lauren, if you are reading this...remember when we took turns buying the serialized episodes of The Green Mile?) Picoult, not so much.
There was a little bit too much going on in this book. Oh...and how annoying is this? The font changed in each chapter depending on from whose perspective it was written. Ugh. Very annoying. I felt like the publisher was saying, "These readers are too stupid to realize that each chapter is written from a different perspective, so we are going to beat them over the head with it in a way that they simply cannot be so dense as to miss."
Come back Jodi! You are prolific, no doubt. You are beautiful. And you look happy on the book jacket. This faithful, longterm reader gives you permission to take a year off. Your "brand" will not suffer if you don't publish for a while. Especially if the resulting novel is back to what you are capable of. I'll be waiting!
Di
I try to like her, I really do, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what makes her books so popular. The situations she presents are facinating, but always feel like some sort of ethical essay test answer. I cannot "get" her characters, and so I try, and then abandon. I can;t feel any humor into her characters, and lightness. So a year ago, I quit. Off the Jodi bandwagon!
Posted by: leigh | May 27, 2008 at 01:35 PM