Leaving Time (with Bonus Novella Larger Than Life)

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Alice, Thomas and Jenna lived and worked with Gideon and his wife Grace, and Grace’s mother Nevvie, all devoted carers for many years. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I recognise Jodi Piccoult is a fantastic and prolific author, and have enjoyed a couple of her books before now.

She didn't need to tell us that the elephant grieved in the same way human's do --- we FELT it loud and clear. In her most gripping mystery since House Rules, Jodi Picoult brings us a powerful story of a young girl's determination to uncover the truth, however shocking and life-changing it might be. My major problem with the book is that the two story lines aren't integrated well at all, and they read like two very different books with only the link between Alice and Jenna tying them together. I don't have much knowledge about psychics or the ESP world in general, but I found this an interesting addition to the story.The cast, Jenna, the daughter, Alice, the mother, Virgil, a cop, and Serenity, a psychic, all play their part in taking us to a satisfying conclusion. So a decision was made to bring two older females, Durga and Owalla, back to Africa from the US where they had been working and training. Best-selling, reliably entertaining, and thought-provoking Picoult's newest multifaceted novel is redolent with elephant lore that explores the animals' behavior when faced with death and grief, and combines a poignant tale of human loss with a perplexing crime story that delivers a powerhouse ending. As a teenager, Jenna now obsessively reads her mother's journals and scans missing persons sites on the computer - hoping to find clues to her mother's whereabouts. Owalla came forward and greeted Randall, and then lifted her trunk and her leg according to his commands, letting the vets treat her without any anesthetic.

It was a social experiment – they thought these teen elephants would bond into a herd, but that didn’t happen, because there was no matriarch. Full of the deep characters and multilayered story lines that have earned [Picoult] a spot in many readers' hearts. Desperate for answers, Jenna uses all her savings to recruit the aid of a private detective - and a psychic. As the three work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they realize that in asking hard questions, they'll have to face even harder answers. At The Elephant Sanctuary in TN, an elephant named Jenny was living peacefully when a new elephant, Shirley, arrived.

I dare not give away the ending to this book; I’d end up with a legion of Jodi Picoult fans erecting a gallows on my front lawn with me as its sole user (actually I'm sure that Jodi Picoult fans are much too nice for that, but they would no doubt do a lot of tut-tutting). I haven’t read any of her books and went to an evening event with her speaking a few years ago which put me off completely, she seemed to business like about her writing! The first hint that a population is being poached is a disparity between females and males – because poachers go for the biggest tusks.

They are very intellectual and emotional animals, and the discussions about how they dealt with grief was heart wrenching. A few of the threads were unnecessary for me like the mentally challenged husband/father, and the whole Nevvie story. We are first introduced to the three female narrators, each in her own voice: 13 year old Jenna; her mother Alice, who ten years ago checked herself out of a hospital never to be seen again; and the down-on-her-luck psychic, Serenity, who Jenna hires to help find Alice.The book is narrated in the first person from the four alternating perspectives of Jenna, Serenity,Virgil and Alice and switches back and forth between the past and the present. For the character of Alice, who studies elephant cognition, I went first to a professor at Vassar – Abigail Baird – who taught me all about the brain and how memory works. Approximately one year after she arrived in LA, she was found dead in the bottom of the enclosure’s pool.