The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 5 stars.

Damn.

I don’t curse. When I finished The Storyteller, I couldn’t craft a coherent sentence. I just sat and thought to myself: damn.

Sage Singer bakes bread. It’s therapy for her, in addition to the grief support group she attends after losing her mother in a car crash. One day she befriends Josef Weber, a fellow support group goer and an elderly man who is a cherished member of their small town community. Sage soon realizes that Josef doesn’t just want her bread: he wants her to kill him. She learns that Josef has committed a terrible crime against humanity and that someone in her own family has suffered at the hands of the Nazis. With this connection in mind Sage struggles to make the right choice. Is it her to duty to deliver him from his wicked past, or would she bringing herself down to his level by doing so? Why is it so hard to find out what’s right, when faced with someone who’s done so much wrong?

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Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 4/5 stars.

Luke Warren finds it easier to live with wolves than with his own human family. His son, Edward, has resided in Thailand for the past five years after having a fight with his father, and his wife, Georgie, has divorced him. Now he only resides with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Cara. But after a devastating car accident leaves Luke comatose and Cara injured, Edward is forced to come back to the states and choose with Cara whether or not his father should be taken off life support. Edward and Cara’s conflicting attitudes toward their father makes the decision difficult, and the things that they will do to get what they want could tear their family apart forever.

Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult

Cover via Goodreads

Rating: 5/5 stars.

Sing You Home is my new favorite novel by Jodi Picoult, and as of now (mid-March, 2011) my favorite book of the year.

There are so many things I wish I could say coherently about this book. I was at a loss of words when I finished it three hours ago, and I still am speechless. But I want to write this review while the emotions it evoked are still at their strongest.

The writing was superb as always. Picoult doesn’t use a lot of “SAT” vocabulary, or extremely complex sentence structure, but the way she engages readers with detail and finesse is extraordinary. I am always tempted to read just a single page more, then just one chapter more, until I’ve gone through the entire 400+ page book. I even forgot to put this on my to-read shelf on Goodreads.

Picoult’s characters are splendid – by the middle of the book I was immersed in Zoe’s yearning for children and Max’s difficulty with alcohol abuse, and I felt like they were real, breathing people. Vanessa’s no-nonsense attitude I admired, and side characters like Dara and Lucy I came to love as well.

The element that really made me appreciate this novel was Picoult’s take on gay marriage, and homosexual inequality in contemporary society. I cannot adequately state how inspiring this book was to me in that regard. Here is one of the many powerful quotes that I had to stop and re-read (I even put this in my favorite quotes section on Facebook)…

“I remember my mother telling me that, when she was a little girl in Catholic school, the nuns used to hit her left hand every time she wrote with it. Nowadays, if a teacher did that, she’d probably be arrested for child abuse. The optimist in me wants to believe sexuality will eventually become like handwriting: there’s no right way or wrong way to do it. We’re all just wired differently.

It’s also worth nothing that, when you meet someone, you never bother to ask if he’s right- or left- handed.

After all: Does it really matter to anyone other than the person holding the pen?”

Beautiful.