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A Novel
by Jodi Picoult
Book Reviewed by:Looks at that delicate moment when a child learns that her parents don't know all of the answers and when being a good parent means letting go of your child.
Jodi Picoult, the New York Times bestselling author of Vanishing Acts, offers her most powerful chronicle yet of an American family with a story that probes the unbreakable bond between parent and child -- and the dangerous repercussions of trying to play the hero.
Trixie Stone is fourteen years old and in love for the first time. She's also the light of her father's life - a straight-A student; a freshman in high school who is pretty and popular; a girl who's always looked up to Daniel Stone as a hero. Until, that is, her world is turned upside down with a single act of violence...and suddenly everything Trixie has believed about her family - and herself - seems to be a lie.
For fifteen years, Daniel Stone has been an even-tempered, mild-mannered man: a stay-at-home dad to Trixie and a husband who has put his own career as a comic book artist behind that of his wife, Laura, who teaches Dante's Inferno at a local college. But years ago, he was completely different: growing up as the only white boy in an Eskimo village, he was teased mercilessly for the color of his skin. He learned to fight back: stealing, drinking, robbing, and cheating his way out of the Alaskan bush. To become part of a family, he reinvented himself, channeling his rage onto the page and burying his past completely...until now. Could the young boy who once made Trixie's face fill with light when he came to the door have been the one to end her childhood forever? She says that he is, and that is all it takes to make Daniel, a man with a history he has hidden even from his family, venture to hell and back in order to protect his daughter.
The Tenth Circle looks at that delicate moment when a child learns that her parents don't know all of the answers and when being a good parent means letting go of your child. It asks whether you can reinvent yourself in the course of a lifetime or if your mistakes are carried forever -- if life is, as in any good comic book, a struggle to control good and evil, or if good and evil control you.
The Secret Message: Many people have written to us asking what the secret message is hidden in Jodi Picoult's The Tenth Circle. Here is the answer.
Prologue
December 23, 2005
This is how it feels when you realize your child is missing: The pit of your stomach freezes fast, while your legs go to jelly. There's one single, blue-bass thud of your heart. The shape of her name, sharp as metal filings, gets caught between your teeth even as you try to force it out in a shout. Fear breathes like a monster into your ear: Where did I see her last? Would she have wandered away? Who could have taken her? And then, finally, your throat seals shut, as you swallow the fact that you've made a mistake you will never be able to fix.
The first time it happened to Daniel Stone, a decade ago, he had been visiting Boston. His wife was at a colloquium at Harvard; that was a good enough reason to take a family vacation. While Laura sat on her panel, Daniel pushed Trixie's stroller the cobbled length of the Freedom Trail. They fed the ducks in the Public Garden; they watched the sloe-eyed sea turtles doing water ballet at...
In her 13th book Picoult does what she does best - creates a fast-paced tale that explores a hot button issue. In this case teen sexual activity, and more specifically date rape; she also throws in some thought provoking explorations on whether it's ever possible to let go of past mistakes in order to reinvent oneself. In addition, she adds an extra twist by collaborating with comic book artist Dustin Weaver, who has created a graphic novel set within her text...continued
Full Review
(789 words)
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Jodi Picoult is the author of Songs of the Humpback Whale (1992),
Harvesting the Heart (1994), Picture Perfect (1995), Mercy (1996),
The Pact (1998); Keeping Faith (1999), Plain Truth (2000),
Salem
Falls (2001), Perfect Match (2002), Second Glance (2003), My Sister's Keeper
(2004), Vanishing Acts (2005), and The Tenth Circle (2006). In
2003 she was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction.
She was born and raised —happily—on Long Island… something that she believed
at first was a detriment to a girl who wanted to be a writer. "I had such an
uneventful childhood that when I was taking writing classes at college, I called
home and asked my mother if maybe there might have been a ...
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