[Review] Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult 
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publishing Date: October 14, 2014
Format: hardcover, ARC
416 Pages
Links: Goodreads | Amazon | B&N

Synopsis 

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.

My Review

No matter what Jodi Picoult writes, I absolutely love it! Leaving Time is another great book that I couldn't put down. Before I read this, I read Where There's Smoke, a short story about one of the main characters in this story. It really helped set this book up for being a fun and interesting read. 

I liked Jenna as a character; she is searching so hard to find the truth about her mother and looks for help in two unlikely people who soon become her friends. Virgil is a grumpy old man who doesn't seem to be happy with anything in life, and Serenity has lost her belief in herself and struggles to get it back. 

This story wasn't what I was really expecting. To be honest, I didn't know too much about it before I started reading, just that Picoult had written it and there were elephants involved. That was more than enough for me to want to read it! And reading this made me so fascinated by elephants! I knew next to nothing about them when I started, but while reading this book, I found myself looking up other facts about them and even looking up the elephant sanctuary in Tennessee, which I was excited to see is a real place! 

This book kept me hooked until the very end. I wanted to know what happened to Alice, the staff of their sanctuary, Jenna, Virgil and Serenity. I certainly wasn't expecting what happened at the end. It completely took me by surprise, but I liked it! So different than what I thought was going to happen, which is one of my favorite things about books and reading: I'm always finding a new way to look at things and never quite know what to expect at the end of stories (:

Favorite Quote

"...when you're a point, all you see is the point. When you're a line, all you see is the line and the point. When you're in three dimensions, you see three dimensions and lines and points. Just because we can't see a fourth dimensions doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means we haven't reached it yet." pg 145

Prequels

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