(448 pages)
How far would you go to protect the ones you love? Worldwide publication of Jodi Picoult's brand new hardback will be a major event. When Daniel Stone was a child, he was the only white boy in a native Eskimo village where his mother taught, and he was teased mercilessly because he was different. He fought back, the baddest of the bad kids: stealing, drinking, robbing and cheating his way out of the Alaskan bush - where he honed his artistic talent, fell in love with a girl and got her pregnant. To become part of a family, he reinvented himself - jettisoning all that anger to become a docile, devoted husband and father. Fifteen years later, when we meet Daniel again, he is a comic book artist. His wife teaches Dante's Inferno at a local college; his daughter, Trixie, is the light of his life - and a girl who only knows her father as the even-tempered, mild-mannered man he has been her whole life. Until, that is, she is date raped...and Daniel finds himself struggling, again, with a powerlessness and a rage that may not just swallow him whole, but destroy his family and his future.
As usual, Jodi Picoult has managed to tell a story with all the weight and emotion it deserve, without glamourising or over-sentimentalising a difficult and very emotive issue. She has made the characters like real people with a whole range of problems and flaws, not just caricatures of the perfect family. The journey Trixie goes through is heart wrenching and extremely believable, and the few incidents at the school make you realise just how horrible being a teenager can be. Daniel manages to contain himself extremely well but inevitably he, like everyone has a breaking point. But is he capable of the worst?? I didn;t think so and the last 100 pages flew by in a flurry as i was dying to get to the end to find out who was.
I would heartily recommend this to everyone especially those who enjoy Picoult's style. Yet again she managed to hit the nail right on the head!
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