BOOK REVIEW: A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult

The Centre for women's reproductive health offers a last chance of hope- but nobody ends up their by choice.
Its very existence is controversial, and to the demonstrators who barricade the building everyday, the service it offers is no different from legalised murder.
Now life and death decisions are being made horrifyingly real: a lone protester with a gun has taken the staff, patients and visitors hostage.
Starting at the tensest moment in the negotiations for their release, A Spark of Light unravels backwards, revealing hour by hour what brought each of the people- the gunman, the negotiator, the doctors, nurses and women who have come to them for treatment- to this point.
And certainties unwind as truths and secrets are peeled away, revealing the complexity of balancing the right to life with the right to choose. 

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Pages: 355

I am a big fan of Jodi Picoult's books and her last book, Small Great Things totally blew me away. However, I have very mixed feelings about her latest book, A Spark of Light. I heard the author talking about it on Radio 4 and the idea sounded fantastic but I came away feeling a little disappointed once I had reached the end.
The premise is that a group of people have been taken hostage at a Women's Health Centre by a gun man. In America, women's health centres deal with female reproductive health and they also carry out abortions. This is obviously a highly contentious issue and I was impressed by how far Picoult went in tackling it. She looks at many different angles and viewpoints, religion, gender, age, sexuality, ethics and morality. I do feel that she engaged in the subject well but the book fell down for me by being overly complicated. The story begins with the final negotiations and works its way back, I didn't have a problem with this but the problem was the number of characters involved. I was fully focused when reading but there were so many times when I was too confused to enjoy the story properly. Each character has their own back history which is a fantastic way of examining different view points. But the sheer amount of characters and jumping back and forth took away the impact of the actual story for me which was a shame.
I still felt quite invested in these characters so I was disappointed when there was a lot of loose ends, I didn't even want happy endings for them all but I was looking for some form of conclusion.
For me, A Spark of Light has a fantastic and important core element in the issue it is tackling but I did not feel that it was executed effectively.

The Lost Daughter by Diane Chamberlain

Sorry that it has been a wee bit quiet on Dot Scribbles recently but I've not been too well, so there has been lots of sleeping during the day rather than blogging! I'm back now though and I have just finished The Lost Daughter by Diane Chamberlain which was fantastic. I had noticed it on quite a few other blogs and managed to swap a copy with someone, it's definitely worth a read.

Would you live a lie to keep your child?
In 1977, pregnant Genevieve Russell disappeared. Twenty years later, her remains are discovered and Timothy Gleason is charged with murder. But there is no sign of the unborn child.
CeeCee Wilkes knows how Genevieve died - because she was there. She also knows what happened to .missing infant, because two decades ago CeeCee made the devastating choice to raise the baby as her own.
Now Timothy Gleason is facing the death penalty, and CeeCee has another choice to make. Tell the truth and destroy her family. Or let an innocent man die to protect a lifetime of lies.

I have read many reviews that have compared this book to those of Jodi Picoult's, I have to say that I think this is better. I always feel that the characters are a little bit distant in Picoult's books but Diane Chamberlain's characters are completely believable and vivid. The action in the book starts immediately as we observe Corinne Bailey's reaction to her mother, CeeCee Wilke's confession about her involvement in the kidnapping of Genevieve Russell. The reader is then taken back to when the devastating events occurred and we begin to build up a picture of the type of person CeeCee Wilkes was at that time and what led her to make the momentous decisions that she did. The scenes described between the young CeeCee and Genevieve are devastating and you can feel the panic and guilt experienced by CeeCee which then permeates throughout the rest of the story.
There is a lot of action in this book but the main purpose is to explore how we deal with the consequences of our actions. Diane Chamberlain explores this by showing how CeeCee Wilkes tried to live her life and bring up the child that she had kidnapped in a loving and stable environment. You gain a real sense though that since that fateful day, CeeCee Wilkes has never been at peace, she has constantly been looking over her shoulder and this is an awful way to live a life. The character of CeeCee Wilkes obviously changes during the book and there were many occasions that I really did not like her but when you see her having to make the decision at the end of the book you see what a completely remarkable person she is.
The very first page of the book obviously gives away the ending and this is quite a long book. So what keeps you reading? For me there were so many things that I wanted to know. What happened to Timothy Gleason? How did CeeCee Wilkes survive? Why did she confess to her actions? How will her 'daughter' react to the knowledge that her whole life has been a lie?
The Lost Daughter in many ways is a simple thriller yet I felt that it was a little bit more than that. As a reader, you are really forced to ask yourself so many questions as you wander how you would react in those situations. Diane Chamberlain takes a really exciting story and uses it to look at some of the most basic aspects of human nature.