My first Review! Second Glance - Jodi Picoult
Title: Second Glance
Author: Jodi Picoult
Year Published: 2007
Date Finished: 27/12/08
Genre: Women's fiction
# Of pages: 478 (paperback)
Where did the book come from: Christmas present
Blurb: From the moment Ross's fiancee Aimee was killed in a car accident, he's been trying to die too. But life won't let him go. His only hope now is that Aimee will come to him.
So when he hears of strange happenings at an ancient Indian burial ground near his sister's home, he heads to Comtosook - desperate fro the rumours of a haunting to be true.
What he finds there is not Aimee's ghost but Lia, a very real woman whose life is filled with as many troubled secrets as his own....
My Comments: I'm well aware that Jodi Picoult is a writer whom you either love or hate - a little like the old Marmite comparison - and I have to admit I've always been in the former category. But the last two books I read - Mercy and The Tenth Circle - failed to grab me in the same way I'd felt previously, so I was a little jaded going into Second Glance. I needn't have been, because Second Glance is far and away her best book so far. Maybe it's because I'm an old romantic and I do believe in the cliche, as Savage Garden sang, of 'love surviving death until eternity' or maybe it's because I'm a history geek or maybe it's just my love of shows like the X-Files and Supernatural, but all the elements in this book just seemed to fall into place for me. I loved and cared about the characters, even secondary character's like Ross's nephew Ethan, because the way they were written they jumped off the page and became real. It was so easy to picture the story and the settings and the people and the book really does manage to take you far from the confines of your own house and into the world she's envisioned when writing it.
It's a masterpiece of storytelling with a real, human sting in the tale, that makes you confront just exactly what we - as human beings - are actually capable of - my favourite old high horse of 'man's inhumanity to man'. Jodi Picoult always manages to make you think - about morality, about humanity, about whatever aspect it is that touches you - and that's why she's at the top of her game.
Rating: A+ - read it. Even if you've never picked up another Jodi Picoult in your life and you never do again, give this one a chance.