review by Maggie Perkovic on show sept 2009
The first time Jane Jones tried to leave her husband, her daughter almost got killed, this time she's going to do it right.
Jane escaped a childhood of abuse into the refuge of marriage, only to find history repeating itself. When her husband's neglect extends to their daughter too, she knows it must stop. Taking Rebecca with her Jane flees to her brother, the only place of safety she knows. But however far she runs, she cannot escape the question always on her mind; how can she save her daughter when she couldn't save herself!!
As a Jodie Picoult fan I was pleased to find one I hadn't read, albeit one of her earliest, in fact, her first novel!
It has all the ingredients of her writing, research and believable characters but she moves backwards and forwards in time so swiftly I got a bit confused/
The research into the Humpback Whales of which her husband, a professor of marine biology, is immersed is very interesting, as is the growing and cultivating of apples with which her brother is also immersed, is also quite gripping. But the action of the plot whizzes us from her childhood, where her father hits both her and her mother, to her marriage, to her bid for freedom where she and her daughter now 15, drive across America to find her brother, for sanctuary, to the dreadful climax; then back again to her husbands work with the whale. You have to be awake to get the sequence of events in the right order!!
Is it worth reading? Oh yes, even an early Picoult is worth reading.
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