Get caught in Picoult’s web…

November 29, 2010 at 1:19 pm | Posted in Middle Weight Fiction | Leave a comment

Jodi Picoult ‘Vanishing Acts’ Rearsby, Clipper, 2006

(x14 CDs, 15hr 30min)


Jodi Picoult is fantastic. She is an author who knows the craft of storytelling instinctively and is a mistress of suspense. She is also an interesting person in her own right.  She studied creative writing at Princeton and has a Masters in Education from Harvard and it wasn’t until she was pregnant with her first child that she wrote her first novel in 1992.  For such a young author (she is forty-three) her world view is impressively broad and sensitive.

The seventeen works of fiction she has already produced are impressive psychological explorations of  dark occurences in ordinary people’s lives. Her ordinary characters deal with these extraordinary circumstances with deeply interesting psychological and moral perspectives that have spun many readers into a captivating web.

Jodi Picoult’s ‘Vanishing Acts’ is wonderful to listen to on CD. Delia Hopkins, the central character, is a young woman preparing for her wedding who is a committed and successful missing persons  investigator . Picoult has her leading lady living in New Hampshire where she is close to her father who has raised her since her mother’s death when she was four years old and is a loving mother to her young daughter Sophie.

You will like her…no reader wouldn’t that is maybe why when the County Police come to arrest her father one day for the kidnapping of a young girl called you feel her shock as strongly as she feels it…..

Picoult will not win any awards for her literary writing. Although this sounds unkind it is just one way to measure a work of fiction. What she excels in is showing a story so compellingly crafted and human it commands million of fans and you can’t argue with that.

This story is so enthralling that while listening to it in my car I would fumble to change the CD’s to the detriment of my driving. Get caught up in Picoult’s web and I’ll meet you there!

Haiku; No one ever knows, the secrets a small town holds, holding out for love.

Click here to view this CD on DLR Library Catalogue

Click here to read book club discussion questions for Vanishing Acts.

 

 

‘….lyrical beauty and ethical depth….’

November 2, 2010 at 1:43 pm | Posted in Great for Book Clubs, Middle Weight Fiction | Leave a comment
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In 1995 Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”. I suddenly remembered this when thinking of ways of describing Anne Tyler’s fiction. Anne’s fiction similarly addresses everyday issues and occurences in the course of her characters lives. Far from being mundane her work addresses the mystic nature of these occurences and the complex and rich emotional situations that compliment them.

Anne is as unassuming as her prose which many reviews of her lately are claiming is responsible for her being lesser known than her contemporaries like John Updike. She has been nominated for the Pulitzer prize twice and has won it once in 1989 for her novel ‘Breathing Lessons’ but the media shy American author from Baltimore hasn’t done a book tour nor given a face to face interview since 1977.

Anne Tyler eighteenth novel ‘Noah’s Compass’ is receiving rave reviews. It is not fair of me to ask what is ‘Noah’s Compass’ about it is much more purposeful to ask what does it address. Other authors write books about the same things as Anne but Anne’s skills as an author explore these ideas in an ethical and deep way using minimal but deftly executed prose. The cover of this book I feel is inappropriate as it suggest a pretty light yarn which is not what she delivers.

‘Noah’s Compass’  addresses the problem of memory loss in older age through the story of Liam Pennywell a sixty year old man who has just lost his teaching post and through an unfortunate incident faces down the onset of memory loss. His life is an ordered and minimalist one. Widowed once and divorced once Liam lives a sparse and often detached life at stages. The distress of his sudden memory loss colours his relations with his family and his outlook on life. He is a man with very little to lose and very little he is able to achieve. Anne’s writing skills explore this intimately and you learn how appropriate the title of the book becomes when you encounter it’s use in the story.

A very fine piece of writing in a very fine body of work from an unsung hero of fiction.

Haiku; A light lit cover, in stark contrast with deftly, executed prose

Click here to view this book on Amazon.co.uk

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