Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

                Jenna Metcalf is looking for her mother. It has been ten years since her mother Alice checked herself out of the hospital and disappeared forever. It was the same night one of the caretakers at the New Hampshire Elephant Sanctuary, the elephant sanctuary her parents ran, was trampled by an elephant and Alice had been found unconscious hours later.  Jenna’s father, Thomas, has been institutionalized since then suffering from manic depression, leaving Jenna to be raised by her grandmother. Now thirteen years old Jenna remembers her mother but only bits and pieces of their lives together. She spends her time either checking the missing person’s database for any information about the mother that left or reading through Alice’s journals trying to imagine the woman her mother was. But Jenna needs her mother and enlist the help of the psychic Serenity and Virgil, one of the cops who handled the death at the sanctuary. Together they begin to uncover the truth around what happened ten years ago and the many reasons Alice may have fled.

                After ten years wouldn’t anyone want answers? Especially when you have these questions that your grandmother seems unwilling to answer and your committed father cant? It was only a matter of time and Jenna took this opportunity to find out as much as she could about what happened to her family. Serenity is a psychic who was once very popular and renowned but after and embarrassing and career crippling failed reading is now struggling to make ends meet. Virgil is no longer with the police force and works under the name Vic as a private eye. The Alice Metcalf disappearance has haunted him for the last ten years as well and though unwilling to admit his own shortcomings, he wants the answer to her disappearance almost as much as Jenna. These three unlikely accomplices have a cold case on their hands and they must depend on each other’s strengths if they ever want to answer any of their questions.

                I am a huge Jodi Picoult fan. HUGE! To the point where I buy everything that she releases because I have so much faith in her writing ability and her storytelling. This novel was a huge disappointment. It felt forced from the very beginning. This story is told from four different perspectives: Jenna, Virgil, Serenity and Alice. I struggled the most with Jenna. Picoult is usually great with taking on the voice of youth and making it realistic and relatable but Jenna felt flat. She was uninteresting and whiny. Virgil and Serenity were a little better but not by much. I could understand and relate to them more than I could Jenna, that’s for sure, but they were still flawed. They seemed like caricatures: the cop that had that one case he couldn’t live down and the psychic who now referred to herself as a “swamp witch” because she gave fake readings to survive. Alice on the other hand was extremely interesting but her story was impeded by the need to relay as much information as possible about elephants and grief and how that relates to the story and human interactions. The entire thing started to feel repetitive after a while. And completely unrealistic. There were inconsistencies riddled throughout and plenty of moments where I just shook my head because the circumstances just seemed ridiculous.

                Leaving Time, in my opinion, honestly felt like Jodi’s attempt to reach outside of her comfort zone and do something completely different. I applaud her for trying something new but this was unsuccessful. I give this book 2 out of 5 stars and I can’t even believe I am writing that. I want to give it higher but I just can’t. It is only because I am such a huge fan of Picoult that I held out faith the entire time that it would get better but it didn’t. I can’t recommend this novel but I could recommend My Sister’s Keeper, The Storyteller, and The Tenth Circle in a heartbeat. This one was a simply a swing and a miss.