by Jodi Picoult

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.

This is the most difficult review I've done since starting my blog. There are some in the blogging world who don't review books that they did not like (rather than leave a bad review), and I thought about whether I should do that with this book. Then I went to Goodreads to see if anyone out there felt the same way I did (since the reviews I'd read for this were all glowing)? Well there were people who felt as I did, and the interesting part was that all of us have read several books by Picoult, and loved them. Nineteen Minutes is one of my top 5 books of all time, and My Sister's Keeper and Harvesting the Heart are also favorites. I decided to forge ahead, because I feel that as long as a review is not malicious, everyone's opinion will be worth it to someone when choosing to read a book.

So exactly what was my problem with this book? I was about halfway through, when I remember thinking "I'm halfway through this book, and NOTHING has happened"! There is a lot of information about elephants in the book, and while I like elephants and find them interesting, there was way too much about them.......frankly, it got boring to me. Maybe I need to stay away from the animal books by Picoult (I remember skipping all the wolf parts in a previous book because I got sick of reading about them). Almost all of Jodi's books have some sort of moral dilemma for the reader (which I love), but I'm not sure what it was supposed to be in this one. Doesn't everyone agree that we shouldn't mistreat elephants (if that was even what it was)?  I also knew I was in trouble when I realized there was a psychic involved. Let me state (again), I am not a fan of ghosts, spirits, angels, aliens, zombies, etc. I very rarely stop reading a book (especially one I plunked down money on), but I might have on this one, but there was this HUGE buzz about the twist at the end. Everyone was going crazy on social media, so I trudged on. The ending (which I'm not going to give away), was the most batsh*t crazy thing I've ever read, and not crazy in a good way! People were saying that the ending had them crying! The only thing I wanted to cry about was that I wasted my time with this one.

This is where I tell you that I am one of a few who did not like this book. And if you are a fan of Jodi Picoult you will like it. Well I am a fan, but this one I just did not like. I will look forward to the next novel, but I may do my research next time before just buying it because of the author. And isn't that what we all should be doing anyway? Lesson learned 🙂