Leaving Time

Leaving Time
by Jod Picoult

Genre:  Fiction
Published: 10/14/14 by Random House
Pages:  416
Format: Hardcover

My rating:
2.5 out of 5 stars








Jodi Picoult's latest novel, Leaving Time, is about a teen girl named Jenna who is on a search to find her mother, Alice.  Alice, an elephant researcher, disappeared after an accident at the elephant sanctuary where she lived and worked.  Jenna enlists the help of a psychic and a former detective to help with her search as she refuses to believe that her mother is dead.

If you love elephants, then you might love this book.  You really have to love elephants though because there is a lot of talk about elephants.  Too much, in my opinion.  I just didn't care about the elephants that much, which led to me skimming through many sections of this book.

Also, I just wasn't interested in the psychic parts of this story either.  So when you combine the elephants with the psychics, there was a huge portion of this book that did not hold my interest at all.  

Then there is the twist ending.  If you are familiar with Jodi Picoult at all, then you know that her books always have a twist ending.  Honestly, I think the best twist that Jodi Picoult could ever write would be to not write a twist at all, and then we would all fall out of our seats from shock!  In the case of Leaving Time, I did not see the twist coming at all.  So she did manage to surprise me.  However, I didn't like it all.  It was not an original idea.  It's been done before and better.  A certain movie comes to most people's minds, but I was reminded of another (much better!) book that I read earlier this year with a similar ending.  In Leaving Time, the ending didn't work and it felt like its only purpose was to surprise the reader.  I didn't feel like the ending worked in a believable way with the story she was telling.

With all of that said, I did read this book very quickly.  I will give Jodi Picoult credit...even when I don't like her books, I still find them to be very readable.  She can keep me turning pages, even with a lame story like this one.