Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult

Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Not one of my favorite Picoult books. I thought the characters and storyline jumped all over the place for my liking and a couple of times, I got a bit confused.



Synopsis from Picoults site:



In this novel, Jodi Picoult interweaves five rich narrative voices to tell a story of love, loss, and self-discovery. The voices belong to a mother, her daughter, and three very different men.



Jane had always lived in somebody's shadow. Escaping a childhood of abuse by marrying oceanographer Oliver Jones, she finds herself taking second place to his increasingly successful career. However, when her daughter Rebecca is slighted, Jane's dramatic stand takes them all by surprise.



Leaving Oliver and his whale tapes behind in San Diego, Jane and Rebecca set out to drive across America to Uncle Joley and the sanctuary of the Massachusetts apple orchard where he works. Joley directs Jane across the United States in a series of letters waiting for her in designated post offices. Each letter gives concise directions to the next post office; each letter provides Jane with a chance to reflect on her forgotten past.



Oliver, used to tracking male humpback whales across vast oceans, now has the task of tracking his tantalizingly unpredictable wife across a continent. To do so he must learn to see the world-- and even himself-- through her eyes.



Songs of the Humpback Whale is a powerful and sensitive novel of family life that questions how songs are passed down from male speaker to male speaker, but also examines the female tradition of listening that women unconsciously pass on to their daughters.



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Second Glance by Jodi Picoult

Second Glance by Jodi Picoult


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought this book was amazing and definitely the best book I have read so far from Jodi Picoult.
The book was well written and researched. I loved the characters and the emotional rollercoaster Picoult takes them through.
I really don't want to say much about the actual storyline as I feel it would give too much away and the new reader needs to let the story unfold itself.


Synopsis from Jodi Picoult dot com:

Do we love across time? Or in spite of it? A developer has slated an ancient Abenaki Indian burial ground for a strip mall, and now strange happenings have tiny Comtosook, Vermont, talking of supernatural forces at work. Ross Wakeman is a ghost hunter who's never seen a ghost-all he's searching for is something to end the pain of losing his fiance Aimee in a car accident. He tried suicide-any number of times. Now Ross lives only for a way to connect with Aimee from beyond. Searching the site for signs of the paranormal, Ross meets the mysterious Lia, who sparks him to life for the first time in years. But the discoveries that await Ross are beyond anything he could dream of in this world-or the next. Expertly entwining a powerful drama of the heart's redemption and the disturbing real-life history of the VT eugenics project of the 1930s, Second Glance asks if truth is always something that can be measured… and if what can be measured is indeed always true.

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My Sisters Keeper by Jodi Picoult

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult


My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a very moving book. It tells of a child who has leukemia and the parents have another child so they can harvest stuff from her body to save their first daughter.The second daughter then decides to take her parents to court to stop the medical precedures. I found this compelling reading and could see both sides of the story.

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Mercy by Jodi Picoult

Mercy by Jodi Picoult

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second Picoult book and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The subject matter centres around euthanasia and the impact it has on others.
I did not like Cam at all. Picoult portrayed him as a typical male chauvanest pig in my opinion.
I thought the book was well wriiten and all the characters had depth to them.


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Synopsis

What would you do for someone you love? Would you lie? Would you leave? Would you kill? These are just some of the questions confronting the characters in Mercy, which follows the path of two cousins driven to extremes by the power of love.

Cameron MacDonald has spent his life guided by duty. As the police chief of a small Massachusetts town that has been home to generations of his Scottish clan, he is bound to the town's residents by blood and honor. Yet when his cousin Jamie arrives at the police station with the body of his wife and the bald confession that he's killed her, Cam immediately places him under arrest.

The situation isn't as clear to Cam's wife, Allie. While she is devoted to her husband, she finds herself siding against Cam, seduced by the picture James paints of a man so in love with a woman that he'd grant all her wishes… even the one that meant taking her life.

Into this charged atmosphere drifts Mia, a new assistant at Allie's floral shop, for whom Cam feels an instant and inexplicable attraction. While he aids the prosecution in preparing the case against Jamie, who killed his terminally ill wife out of mercy, Cam finds himself betraying his own wife.

Woven tight with passion and a fast-paced plot, Mercy explores some of today's most highly charged emotional and ethical issues as it draws toward its stunning conclusion. When you love someone, where do you cross the line of moral obligation? And how can you commonly define love and devotion to begin with? Long after you have turned the last page, you'll still be thinking about this rich novel, as well as questioning your own beliefs about love and loyalty.

The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult

The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was my first Jodi Picoult book and I have to say I enjoyed it tremendously. I had trouble putting it down. I thought that the characters were very strong and very believable.

The book revolves around a young teenage girl who is raped. And it does get you thinking how you would react if you were that childs parent.


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Author Synopsis

When Daniel Stone was a child, he was the only white boy in a native Eskimo village where his mother taught, and he was teased mercilessly because he was different. He fought back, the baddest of the bad kids: stealing, drinking, robbing and cheating his way out of the Alaskan bush – where he honed his artistic talent, fell in love with a girl and got her pregnant. To become part of a family, he reinvented himself – jettisoning all that anger to become a docile, devoted husband and father. Fifteen years later, when we meet Daniel again, he is a comic book artist. His wife teaches Dante’s Inferno at a local college; his daughter, Trixie, is the light of his life – and a girl who only knows her father as the even-tempered, mild-mannered man he has been her whole life. Until, that is, she is date raped…and Daniel finds himself struggling, again, with a powerlessness and a rage that may not just swallow him whole, but destroy his family and his future.