The Tenth Circle, Jodi Picoult

I know, I know.  I know I said I was done with Jodi Picoult.  But I was at my aunt and uncle’s last night, and I had The Charioteer but I am in London, I don’t have loads of books with me, and I didn’t want to use up The Charioteer because I love it so much.  So I read The Tenth Circle, which my aunt and uncle had on their bookshelf.  The issue: date rape.  The court scenes: none – shocking, I know.  However, there is a murder.

As Jodi Picoult’s books go, this is not one of her better ones.  I thought it was silly.  Must everyone in her books behave in this fashion all the time?  I’m sorry, but you can’t just go around killing people.  You just can’t.  It is inappropriate behavior.

Keeping Faith, Jodi Picoult

Yeah, pretty much, Jodi Picoult.  Her books tend to be largely the same.  Keeping Faith has all the elements – moral quandaries, relationship troubles, fierce mothers, legal battles, and handsome men hopelessly in love with the protagonist.  I read it because I was at my parents’ house and I didn’t have my books with me, and I needed something to read for a while.  And then of course I got interested and took it home to finish it.  As I say, it was much like all of Jodi Picoult’s other books.  Always entertaining but not generally worth rereading.

Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult

The addiction continues.  This one’s about a school shooting.  Only one silly thing happens, and it’s not all that silly.  Definitely not as silly as poisoning the Louisiana priest with antifreeze in his cocoa.

…I can’t do this.  I don’t have the heart to continue reviewing this.  I’m too depressed.  I’m about to go directly into a decline.  I’m taking to my bed and I may never rise from it again.  I have several seasons of Gilmore Girls out from the library, my computer is plugged in, I have my cross-stitching, and I can stay lying in this flip chair for the rest of my life.

Florida kicked our ass.  51 to 21.  I shall never recover from this blow.

(I think my life was easier before I cared about football.)

Perfect Match and Vanishing Acts, Jodi Picoult

Sigh.

I know she’s better than this.  Ms. Picoult is an excellent writer.  She does good dialogue, her characters are generally consistent, the little kids are really good little kids.  In each case where I have begun reading a book of hers, I have stayed up way past my bedtime finishing it.  (In the case of Vanishing Acts, I was already up thoroughly late because I was introducing my friend Teacher to Firefly and I didn’t want to let her leave until she totally liked it and had stopped saying snide things about Kaylee.  Victory!)  So I will not suggest that she is a bad writer, at all.

Here’s the thing.  Sister loves her some dramatic irony.  And, um, also just some irony.  Also just some drama.  She is much with the drama and the irony and the dramatic irony.  It detracts from her books.  I mean, I didn’t even think it was possible to use the adjective “silly” to describe a book all about child sex abuse, but I can’t use any other adjective to describe Perfect Match.  I don’t even know where to begin spoiling it.  I mean, there’s the part where Nina shoots the priest in court and then acts crazy; there’s the part where it turns out that not he but a similarly-named priest from Loosiana (of course) who happens to be the dead priest’s half-brother who donated bone marrow to him to cure him of leukemia.  I mean, because why not?  And then there’s the part where the husband, who’s spent the whole book being all judgey-judge, secretly flies down to Loosiana and poisons the real perpetrator with antifreeze.  Oh, and the requisite guy in love with the female protagonist, hovering sadly in the wings.

It’s a shame, you know?  I feel like Jodi Picoult could write much better books than she is actually writing – though I suppose she’s feeling if it’s not broke don’t fix it.  (That expression never fails to make me think of that moment in the Disney Beauty and the Beast where Cogsworth and Lumiere are showing Belle around the castle and he’s talking about the baroque tapestries and he says “And as I always saaaay, if it’s not baroque – don’t fix it!”  Anyone else?  Anyone?)  It’s not the writing, it’s the plots.  She can’t resist high drama, and she can’t resist crazy plot twists, and it detracts from her books.  Making them into guilty pleasure type books, when I really think they could be a lot more.

Which of course isn’t stopping me from being on my massive Jodi Picoult kick, so I’m just off to read Nineteen Minutes now.  I am sure I will feel much the same about that one.

My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult

My mum told me to read this.  I love my darling mum.  She must never, never, never become sick.  And neither must my father or any of my sisters.  They must stay in perfect health until they are very, very old, and then I will accept that as part of the circle of life they must die peacefully in their sleep after first ringing me up to say a satisfactory goodbye.

That is the plan.  Deviance will not be tolerated.

I really don’t like thinking about my family members dying.  Because of Jodi Picoult, I thought about it a lot last night when I was finishing up My Sister’s Keeper, and so I cried and cried and cried and cried until I fell asleep.  (I was very tired; when my alarm went off, I was dreaming about hanging out with Social Sister, and she said, “Don’t listen to that stupid news guy!  Let’s watch The Office,” and I said, “No, no, I have to wake up,” and she said, “Let’s watch Buffy!  Hey, let’s get pizza from Papa Murphy’s and have a great big Buffy and Angel marathon!” and I said, “But my alarm is going off,” and she said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you!  Anna Banana’s in town!  We can all three eat pizza and watch Buffy and Angel together!  Just like old times!”  And then I realized what my subconscious was trying to do, and I think it was a pretty cheap trick, frankly, pretending that my much-missed sister was back in town just to keep me asleep.)

Er, but back to Ms. Picoult’s book.  It’s all about a girl called Anna (hmph) who was conceived in order to be a donor for her older sister Kate, who has a particularly virulent form of leukemia; she has donated various body parts her whole life and is now (she’s thirteen) being asked for a kidney.  So she goes to a lawyer and asks him to represent her so that she can become medically emancipated from her parents and make her own decisions about her kidneys.  And quite rightly.

The story’s told from the viewpoints of all the involved parties – Anna, each of her parents, her older brother Jesse, the lawyer in question (Campbell Alexander), and her appointed guardian ad litem (Julia Romano, who has a History with Campbell Alexander).  I was surprised by how naturally Jodi Picoult writes; everything flows much more nicely than I was expecting, and the characters are all sympathetic.  I started reading this because I stopped by my parents’ house to tell my parents some good news and then we decided to go get dinner to celebrate but we couldn’t go until six and I didn’t have The Hills at Home with me so I swiped this from Mumsy and read it instead.  I read it for an hour there, and then when we were done with dinner, I washed my hair and read it until I was done.  In spite of being very tired.  So it is a good book, and a most absorbing read.

However – spoilers to follow – there were a few things I thought were a bit device-y.  Namely, the whole plotline with Campbell Alexander’s top-secret medical condition that caused him to break up with Julia even though he truly, truly loved her.  That felt contrived.  I mean, I’m not necessarily against those hurt-them-to-save-them plotlines, as long as you’re saving them from, I don’t know, getting shot, or eaten by you in werewolf form.  In this case he didn’t want her to have to stop being a free spirit – which even then wouldn’t have been so bad (because young people are stupid and do dramatic gesture things), but it got made into this big mystery that you’re wondering about all through the book.  (I mean, I wasn’t – I checked the end – but other people might have been.)  And it’s a bit soapy – the rest of the book is all with the tension and the moral dilemmas, and this plotline took away from that.

Okay, and can we discuss the end for a second?  I knew the ending before I started reading, because my mother told me, but I still felt cheated once I got there.  Here you have this book all about making choices and living with the consequences, about a kid whose life has been eaten up by the needs of her sick sibling and her struggles to form an independent identity, and then at the moment of victory, she dies and they take her kidney after all?  Oh, it was so unfair to the rest of the book.  The natural end to this book is, Kate dies.  Of course she dies!  Anna doesn’t donate the kidney, and Kate dies; Anna does donate the kidney, and Kate dies anyway; they find another donor and for a while it’s a miracle but then Kate dies anyway.  Grrr.