I'm not quite sure how to review this novel. It is surely one of the most closely-observed and depressing family dramas I have ever read. It also quite possibly one of the best - taking a backseat only to the marvelous "Poisonwood Bible".
Jodi Picoult is a writer who can't ever seem to get her voracious need to describe everything around her under control. She writes dizzying circles of metaphor around herself just to explain to us the potency of life and love and pain and tragedy and growing up.
How would you react when confronted with this situation: You are an up-and-coming comic book artist who has put his career on hold for the last 15 years to raise your daughter, who you love more than life itself, and be a stay at home dad. Your wife teaches "The Inferno" at the local college and is one of the premiere Dante scholars in the country. You feel yourself growing distant from your daughter and you know your wife is hiding...something. But you're all shocked into reality when your daughter accuses her ex-boyfriend of raping her.
This bare-bones description doesn't come close to expressing the intricate-ness of Picoult's 13th work. Near the end the cracks start to show as all of her wild imagery and metaphor (filled with blizzards, birds, eskimos, and folk lore) seems to gain a mind of its own and leaves the reader in the dust, although wisely paralelling her story with an in-book comic helps us decipher some of the more subtle messages. I'm floored by the near perfection and inventiveness of Picoult's writing style. As she would say perhaps about her own book: it lands like a crow on your stomach in the middle of a snow storm.
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