My thoughts on Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

Hi All,

Just finished another excellent Jodi Picoult book, Leaving Time.

So as not to give away the ending, I’ll paste the jacket blurb at the end of this blog to give you the gist of the novel.

What I loved about the book was Jodi’s trademark, comprehensive research. I learned so much about African and Asian elephants – from their capacity to feel grief to their remarkable intelligence and tremendous ability to recall a lifetime of memories.

Her characters, as always, were strong and likeable. I was surprised at one of her main characters, Serenity. Like my character, Ella, in Gracie’s Girls, Serenity is a psychic who also uses tarot. Again, I was impressed with Jodi’s paranormal research and couldn’t help relating it to my own. Thankfully, Serenity and Ella have very different views on the afterlife and spirits and they both ‘see’ things very differently. Of course there were similarities. It’s a little like religious interpretation where many of the same beliefs coexist with divergent ideas.

The ending was brilliant and, no, I didn’t see it coming which is very unusual for me.

The only negative (and it’s a very small one and somewhat pedantic) was counting the word ‘that’ thirteen times on the first page. It’s become a pet peeve of mine and I tend to force myself to eradicate the word when it’s not needed. The rest of the book was largely ‘that-less’ :).

To finish on a positive note, I highly recommend the book, especially if you’re an animal lover with a penchant for the paranormal. You can buy it here.

Happy reading all, take care, Viv x

About Leaving Time

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 that she would be abandoned as a young child, 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. The first is Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons—only to later doubt her gifts. The second is Virgil Stanhope, a jaded private detective who 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 Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish. A deeply moving, gripping, and intelligent page-turner, Leaving Time is Jodi Picoult at the height of her powers.