The Storyteller

Sage Singer is a baker. She works through the night, preparing the day's breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother's death. When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage's grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Despite their differences, they see in each other the hidden scars that others can't, and they become companions.

Everything changes on the day that Josef confesses a long-buried and shameful secret--one that nobody else in town would ever suspect--and asks Sage for an extraordinary favor. If she says yes, she faces not only moral repercussions, but potentially legal ones as well. With her own identity suddenly challenged, and the integrity of the closest friend she's ever had clouded, Sage begins to question the assumptions and expectations she's made about her life and her family. When does a moral choice become a moral imperative? And where does one draw the line between punishment and justice, forgiveness and mercy?

In this searingly honest novel, Jodi Picoult gracefully explores the lengths we will go in order to protect our families and to keep the past from dictating the future.

(NOTE: the above summation is what I believe is printed on the hardcover Canadian edition. I don't know for sure because I bought the ebook and so it doesn't have the dust jacket. Goodreads offers another description that, I feel, gives away WAY more of the plot, so I chose to post this one, even though the other description is the one that made it impossible for me to wait to read it.)


I really don't think I give Jodi Picoult enough credit.

I know that some of my former bookstore coworkers would balk at that comment. But it's true. She weaves one hell of an impressive story. She won't be winning any Gillers or Pulitzer Prizes any time soon, but she is a great storyteller (pun entirely intended). I am almost tempted to compare her to Stephenie Meyer of the Twilight series, but I think she is better than that. She is a good author, just not a great one.

The only real complaint I have about her writing is that she has become predictable in her plot twist endings. If she didn't make this a "calling card" of all of her books, I probably wouldn't have seen the one in this book coming. Instead, knowing it would be there, I read every word very carefully and committed certain plot points to memory and made a handful of predictions about how the book would end. One of them was right. And I KNEW that one was going to be right because I did "fine-tooth comb" the book, and there was one detail that I could NOT ignore. And I turned out to be right. Neener-neener. But maybe if this was your first Picoult book, you wouldn't see it coming.

The flipside to the predicted plot twist is that things that would normally be predictible I didn't see coming. At one point I actually thought to myself "OMG! There's the plot twist!" and then realized that it really wasn't a twist at all, but it just shocked me because I hadn't made that particular mental note during my reading.

I think that if Picoult was to ditch the plot twist ending in one of her future books I would totally love it, because I wouldn't see THAT coming.