Sarah's Books

Get caught in Picoult’s web…

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.