Leaving
Time, by Jodi Picoult (2014) 5 Stars
Leaving
Time is told through the eyes of several characters: There is Jenna, a thirteen-year old girl, who
has spent the past 10 years wondering why her mother left her when she was
three-years old. There is Alice Metcalf,
Jenna’s mother who has spent her entire professional life studying elephants,
specifically how elephants experience grief.
There is Serenity Jones, a washed up psychic. There is Virgil Stanhope, a former cop who investigated the tragedy at the elephant sanctuary 10 years earlier. Ostensibly he committed suicide on the day of his promotion, only to reappear as
Victor, a private investigator. And
finally, there are the elephants residing in an elephant sanctuary in New
Hampshire.
Alice had
been studying elephants in Africa when she meets Thomas Metcalf, who ran an elephant
sanctuary in the States. They have a
brief night of passion, before he returns to New Hampshire. They stay in touch, but when Alice discovers
she is pregnant, she visits Thomas in New Hampshire. They wed before they really know each other
and she learns of his mental illness. She stays with Thomas working at the elephant sanctuary while trying to continue her research.
The novel
unwinds between the present and the past, and slowly the reader begins to piece
together the tragedy that occurred at the elephant sanctuary 10 years earlier,
leaving Jenna motherless with the mysterious disappearance of her mother. Virgil was one of the cops who investigated
the original events, but realized at the time the case was handled badly. He hopes to redeem himself by helping Jenna search
for her mother.
Through Alice’s voice, we learn about elephant behavior. Elephants grieve for lost members of the
herd, and when a mother loses a calf, it will stay with the body for days as it
grieves. Picoult did her research, and as noted in the Afterwards, the bits
about the elephants are based on real elephants at the Elephant Sanctuary in
Tennessee, an actual sanctuary for elephants in captivity.
The ending, while fitting for the novel, requires a bit of magical
thinking. It does explain, however, some
of the seemingly inconsistence in Jenna’s life.
I enjoyed this novel and read it in two days.
Read: March 12, 2016
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