Ok I admit that I am a bit
of a fan of Jodi Picoult’s. She is something else as writers go and I like a
writer who treats their reader with a degree of respect. This tale meets my
requirements nicely, always surprising and educational and very often seriously
worrying. This book made me glad that my own daughter is a grown up married
woman with her own businesses that keep her challenged and busy. I am also glad
that I grew up in a different time when the world was not full of the pressures
that teenagers have to cope with these days.
The book that I have just
finished reading was The Tenth Circle. It has what appears on the surface to be
a fairly normal family but the waves riding underneath each of them are a
little bit hair-raising. What it made me feel was that we so rarely know
anybody in our own circle down to the very bone and into their darkest depths.
Every body lives in their own world and each world varies so much and in so
many complicated inexplicable ways. We all pass warning signs and some of us
pass them with less consideration than others, some come out unscathed and
others are damaged forever.
Apart from the story; about
a date rape that is questioned by everybody who hears about it, there are plots
and sub plots and windows into unknown worlds. I found out a little about the
Yup’ik region and people something I only had a surface knowledge of from
romantic tales about those people and their lives. I had thought that there
were very few of these folk and I suppose, having looked it up that 34,000
roughly, is just a few in world terms. We do take our modern soft living for
granted don’t we? I enjoyed the character of the father in this story, who is a
fantasy comic book artist and who had a harsh childhood brought up with the
Yup’ik and still has a fairly wild thinker managed only just under the surface
of his life with a college professor wife who is also no goody-goody. Essential
to the story, there is also a heavy helping of Dante throughout. It’s
complicated and unsweetened.
Much of this book was read
in the middle of the night because I could not leave it for the next day if I
woke up and thought about what I had already read. Earlier this year I read
House Rules which was equally worrying and just as informative as this story.
Last December Steve and I listened to Leaving Time, together on the long car journey
to our holiday and I can say for sure that you will learn everything left that
you did not know about Elephants with that book! All by Jodi Picoult.
I do love a good book.
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