Second Glance : A Novel
by Jodi Picoult
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jodi PicoultEdition: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2004-03-02
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 448
Book Reviews of Second Glance : A Novel
Book Review: Wow!
Summary: 5 Stars
Say what you want about Jodi Picoult's writing, but nobody can deny the woman knows how to write, and pulls out every stop she can to do her research and drive her point home. People have stopped me on the metro when I'm reading one of her books (side note: Please wait until someone's closed their book to interrupt them. You never know when they're at an integral part of the storyline.) and asked me if I'd recommend her, told me that they hated fiction, but she's the bridge that connects their non-fiction predilection to a foray in fiction. My least favorite thing about reading her in public is the people who like to point out that she's become predictable in her unpredictability. Really? Her books are known for courtroom spins to be sure but not all of them have it. Case in point? My favorite book of hers: Second Glance.
Ross Wakeman has merely existed for a couple of years now. Not by choice, as he's tried to end his existence for the same duration. When he lost his fianc?e in a horrific car accident, going to help the other driver as Aimee appeared unhurt, he realized how wrong he was when he went to tend to her, only to find her already gone. Since then, he's become a ghost hunter. To no avail, but he won't stop searching for her. After finding out his boss is a fraud, Ross quits and heads to his sister's house in a town where a burial ground has been sold to a developer who plans a strip mall. Strange events begin occurring and Ross investigates. On the grounds, he meets a woman, Lia, who makes him feel for the first time in a long time.
Intersecting Ross' story, is the tale of Cissy Pike, a pregnant woman in the 1930s who's never felt as though she measures up to the ideals of her father and her husband Spencer, two eugenics professors who believe something very reminiscent of Hitler's one true race. Although Cissy doesn't feel absolute love for her husband, she does care about him and knows that he does love her, and that is reason enough for her to try to meet the standards which he expects.
There are so many things going on in this novel that it's hard to pick a favorite plot. Picoult has drawn parallels between today's stem cell research and compared it to the Eugenics projects of the 1930s. She's also told the love stories between a mother and a son, and a man who lost the love of his life and blames himself. Interwoven in this is a ghost story. I'm wrong, I've picked a favorite. The supernatural aspect was such an unexpected development in the plot but became such an integral part of pulling everything together. For those who say that her unexpected twists have become predictable, I'd have to say pick up Second Glance or Keeping Faith, or Change of Heart. While you're surely expecting a twist, you never know where the twists will be thrown in.
Summary of Second Glance : A Novel
"Sometimes I wonder....Can a ghost find you, if she wants to?"
An intricate tale of love, haunting memories, and renewal, Second Glance begins in current-day Vermont, where an old man puts a piece of land up for sale and unintentionally raises protest from the local Abenaki Indian tribe, who insist it's a burial ground. When odd, supernatural events plague the town of Comtosook, a ghost hunter is hired by the developer to help convince the residents that there's nothing spiritual about the property.
Enter Ross Wakeman, a suicidal drifter who has put himself in mortal danger time and again. He's driven his car off a bridge into a lake. He's been mugged in New York City and struck by lightning in a calm country field. Yet despite his best efforts, life clings to him and pulls him ever deeper into the empty existence he cannot bear since his fianc,e's death in a car crash eight years ago. Ross now lives only for the moment he might once again encounter the woman he loves. But in Comtosook, the only discovery Ross can lay claim to is that of Lia Beaumont, a skittish, mysterious woman who, like Ross, is on a search for something beyond the boundary separating life and death. Thus begins Jodi Picoult's enthralling and ultimately astonishing story of love, fate, and a crime of passion.
Hailed by critics as a "master" storyteller (Washington Post), Picoult once again "pushes herself, and consequently the reader, to think about the unthinkable" (Denver Post). Second Glance, her eeriest and most engrossing work yet, delves into a virtually unknown chapter of American history -- Vermont's eugenics project of the 1920s and 30s -- to provide a compelling study of the things that come back to haunt us -- literally and figuratively. Do we love across time, or in spite of it?
Ghosts and ghost hunters collide in this compelling tale of the paranormal set in Vermont's green mountains. When the patriarch of the Abenaki Indian tribe that was nearly eradicated by that state's eugenics project in the 1930s encounters Ross Wakeman, the miraculous survivor of several attempted suicides who wants nothing more than to be reunited with the woman he loved and lost, they set in motion a chain of events that will unravel an ancient murder and lead to a second chance at life and love for the victim's descendants. Picoult, author of Salem Falls, brings the past alive and peoples it with a cast of extraordinarily well-realized characters whose reach into the future touches the lives of a dying boy, a frightened girl, and their mothers--two women who've given up on love until the revenants stirred up by a plan to develop an ancient burial ground show them what they're missing. Second Glance is an intricate and suspenseful ghost story that enchants and illuminates all the way to its powerful conclusion. --Jane Adams
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