Book Review: Leaving Time (Jodi Picoult)

What a beautiful tale this is; I don’t know if it’s the lulling sound of the narration as she speaks of the Elephants but I feel like I am gently being rocked back and forth in the warm and safe arms of my mother as she reads me this story.

I love how Picoult has mingled together a fiction story with large non-fictional elements about Elephants; though it does not read like non-fiction, except that I feel like I am at Elephant University, learning everything there is to know about these beautiful creatures.

The story is about tennage Jenna who lives with her grandmother because her father has alzheimers and lives in a “home” and her mother is a mystery. Jenna has spent her whole life trying to find her mother and find out what happened to her. All she knows is that she went missing one night, but it is unclear whether she left of her own volition, or she ran-away from something or someone, or if she is dead. Jenna goes to a psychic to find out – Serenity (who was once a real phychic but seems to have lost her “powers”). She also enlists the help of a private detective who just so happens to be the cop who investigated her mothers case 10 years ago.

I love how the story above is intermingled with the stories of her mother (from her diaries) working in Botswana with African Elephants. According to the book elephants grieve, they visit the grave site of an elephant they love and pay their respects, they are fantastic mothers (the best in the animal kingdom), they never forget (as the addage says) and they can be surprisingly gentle given their size. At the end Jodi explains that everything she has written about elephants is true and comes from recent research from those working closely with Elephants.

This is the kind of book where it is important not to give too much away so I won’t say a lot more, only to say that the book takes a different trajectory to what I had imagined, and the book is so much the better for it. This is one of the best books I have read in a long time, it made me really feel, it was magical.