I finally finished reading Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult. It took me longer to read it than I thought it would! It is difficult to discuss the book without discussing the twist towards the end – but discussing it would be spoiling the reveal for those of you who haven’t read it yet, so I will have to leave that part out! “For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts. Desperate to find the truth, Jenna enlists two unlikely allies in her quest: Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons, only to later doubt her gifts, and Virgil Stanhope, the jaded private detective who’d originally investigated Alice’s case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues. 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.” As Picoult does, the chapters alternated between Jenna, Serenity, Virgil, and Alice. Alice’s chapters include a lot of information about elephants, which is interesting, but did not hold my attention as well as the other chapters did, at least in the beginning of the book. My favorite narrator was Jenna, whose personality was enjoyable and fun to read. As for that twist ending – I didn’t expect it!
If you read this book, what did you think?