Perfect Match, Jodi Picoult

There are many reasons to enjoy Jodi Picoult – of course, the main one is that she writes a cracker of a story. Perfect Match is no exception. It’s a gripping story. Meet Nina Frost, a prosecutor who faces the most devastating crimes, deals with the most devastating of victims and tries her utmost to conduct herself according to the laws that bind her profession as well as the morals and ethics by which she lives.

Frost is a likable and indeed a noble character. Readers will easily empathise with her and her life and her mission to defend and support these victims.

However, Frost’s world crumbles when she and her husband discover that their five year old son has been sexually assaulted. Suddenly, Frost is confronted with the reality of the nightmare that she sees her clients battling and she is seemingly powerless to deal with it.

This book is about people and the lengths to which they will go when trying to defend those that they love. It is about the battle professional and personal values, and, above all, it is about the mistakes that we make and how those mistakes can effect our lives and those of the people around us.

This one is a fantastic holiday read with some great fodder for discussion thrown in to the mix.

What I Loved

What I Loved was this book. No question, it’s one of my favourite for 2010. It was intense, emotional, exhausting, sublime and depressing. The writing – magnificent. The characters – realistic and resonating. The grief was so realistic and draining that at times I could only read a few pages before having to put the book down and digest the raw turmoil that the characters were enduring. Rather than giving anything more away, I thought that I would just leave you with a few of quotes from the novel which have stayed with me.

For me, I was taken in by this novel from its opening:
“Yesterday I found Violet’s letters to Bill. They were hidden between the pages of one of his books and came tumbling out and fell to the floor. I had known about the letters for years, but neither Bill nor Violet had ever told me what was in them. What they did tell me was that minutes after reading the fifth and last letter, Bill changed his mind about his marriage to Lucille, walked out the door of the building on Greene Street, and headed straight for Violet’s apartment in the East Village … When I put the letters down, I knew that I would start writing this book today.”
It is this paradigm that cloaks the novel and through its telling the background to this moment becomes painfully clear.

I won’t spoil the story, but a quote from later in the book sums up the intensity of the themes:
“equating horror with the inhuman has always struck me as convenient but fallacious, if only because I was born into a century that should have ended such talk for good. For me, the lamp became the sign not of the inhuman but of the all-too-human, the lapse or break that occurs in people when empathy is gone, when others aren’t a part of us anymore but are turned into things. There is genuine irony in the fact that my empathy for Mark vanished at the moment when I understood that he had not a shred of that quality in himself.”

This book gave me goosebumps. I am in awe of the magnificence of this prose and impressed by the fact that this author clearly expects her readers to savour every word of the text, to mull over each sentence and to revel in the grace of this novel… “what was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself. The longer I live, the more convinced I am that when I say ‘I’, I am really saying ‘we’…”

I will definitely be reading more of this author’s work!

Buy this book.

Read something fascinating about the author.

A gripping, tortured tale

PORTRAIT of an addict as a young man.
WHEW! I am blown away by this intense tale, by the obsession, the need that it describes. The horror subtle but every present and disturbing in many ways. Mostly, it’s sad. Terribly sad that people plummet and fall and waste away.
Thus book pulses with wrought honesty. Brace yourself seriously for this ride!

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More coming soon!