Leaving Time (Book Review)

Non-Spoiler Review

Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult is a book about a 13 year old girl named Jenna who wants to find her mother, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances when she was a young child.

This book uses a writing style that is a personal favourite of mine. It's told in the first person, which I generally like more than third person, and then it also switches between a set of four main characters. Before reading this book I'd only seen the alternating first person perspective be used by Susan Howatch in The Wonder Worker and to a lesser extent, The Heart Breaker. I like this way of writing because you get the intimate stream of consciousness, but it's not just limited to the protagonist. Apparently most of Picoult's books are written in this manner.

The book alternates between Jenna's timeline in the present and her mother Alice's in the past. Jenna's timeline is shared between her and two people that she recruits for her cause. They often would end on a cliffhanger, with Alice having a shorter segment to buffer between a change in narrator in Jenna's timeline.

Alice is an elephant researcher, and her story takes place between her studies in Botswana and at an elephant sanctuary in New Hampshire. It just so happens that elephants are my favourite animal, and I got to learn a bunch of new neat facts about them. I learned that their hind legs are more sensitive than their front, and they use them when they want to take in sensory information like we do with our hands, and that their front legs are duller and better for stomping things. So their hind legs are like hands and their front legs are like feet. I learned that males go through a period called musth, where their testosterone spikes in something like a masculine equivalent to going in heat. I learned that they can only breathe through their trunks, not their mouths, so if their trunk is blocked they will suffocate. I learned that when they mourn, fluid can leak from holes in the side of their head, similar to how we cry from our eyes. In the book, they would always refer to this as "secreting from their temporal glands". Not nearly as catchy as "crying". 

The book's themes are the nature of memory, grief, and the relationships between mothers and their children. As information gets revealed, it's very tempting to try and put the pieces together and figure out how Alice disappeared. I know I tried. I was still completely taken by surprise at the final reveal.

All in all, I really enjoyed this book. It's my favourite of the seven I've read since I started to get back into it.

Spoiler Review

I really enjoyed the twist. The whole "They were a ghost the whole time!" has been kind of overplayed, but this one got me by surprise because pretty much everyone was a ghost. It's like if in the Sixth Sense, everyone except the detective, including the protagonist, was dead.

Only Serenity, Thomas, and of all people, Alice, were alive throughout the story. It feels like that wouldn't be possible, but because of the sheer audacity of the claim, along with how many details they offered to explain it, made it feel like Picoult knew what she was doing.

Virgil? Dead. Jenna? Dead. Nevvie and Gideon, who were revealed to be alive? Dead. Talula, the forensic scientist who ran a genetic test and determined it was Alice's hair on Nevvie's corpse? Dead. The old cop who lets Virgil into the evidence room? Dead. Jenna's grandma? Virgil's landlady? The kid that Jenna babysits who we never meet but gets mentioned several times? Dead, dead, and dead. Even Maura is a ghost elephant. All information volunteered by the book at the reveal, so you know they weren't oversights.

The book continues to reveal that most of the living people were only responding to Serenity when the three of them were together, such as the waitstaff at the cafe, the workers at Thomas' long term care home, Serenity's client, and the passenger she was sitting next to on the plane. Jenna and her grandma's house, and Virgil's office are revealed to be like, ghost zones that look totally different to people in the world of the living.

It's like a dare to go back and read every interaction to see if they hold up to what the book establishes as the rules for ghosts. Jenna goes to the police station and a woman tells Jenna that Virgil is dead. Very funny that this fact is so clearly stated, but then it's "dismissed" in the next section when it's narrated by Virgil. Anyway, it seems like a contradiction that the woman could see Jenna, but before that she tried to talk to another woman who acted like she couldn't see her. Jenna chalks it up to being disrespected as a 13 year old, but on a reread you know it's because the woman literally can't see her. So the book was aware of Jenna's ghost status and the second woman had to either be a psychic or a ghost herself.

The way Jenna hitches rides on Greyhound buses for free by hanging near a family and pretending to be with them, which she refers to as haunting them, is cute since it turns out she's actually haunting them.

Virgil's an alcoholic, so he has to purchase his booze from somewhere right? Is he buying ghost vodka from a ghost liquor store? And he brought physical evidence from the police station to his office. A drunk guy at the bar under Serenity's apartment hits on Jenna. Jenna pays an annual subscription fee for an online database She ages from being three to 13 after she dies! All of this is possible for ghosts?

Thomas interacts with Jenna regularly, but Serenity establishes that mentally unstable people can often see the supernatural. What's odd is that he hits Jenna, who's a ghost and she feels it. That might be explained away as us not knowing how ghosts experience us, but then Virgil hits Thomas! A living person was hit by a ghost! Makes you wonder what those workers that came to restrain him might have seen.

Another thing I don't understand is that on the search for Gideon, Serenity and Virgil find Nevvie, who is now blind. At the time, Virgil is playing with the idea that Alice was the one who actually died, and that Nevvie was found with the head injury and wandered away from the hospital. He hypothesizes that Nevvie is blind now because of the head injury, which she confirms by saying that she can't see ever since the incident. My issue with this is that Nevvie was never blind in life, so why would she be blind as a ghost?

The actual reveal was initiated in such a cool way. Virgil, unknowingly a ghost himself, is the established skeptic of the team and butts heads with Serenity all the time on the validity of her work. So it was cool that it was him, having finally put together the pieces of the case he was never able to solve, finds closure and realizes that he had died in his suicide attempt long ago. As he realizes this, he looks to Serenity and before he fades, thinks "She's not a lousy psychic. She's a fucking great one." Very satisfying.

Also a great way to tie it to the fact that Serenity herself had no idea that the people she was interacting with were ghosts, and for the entire story thought that she had lost her gift long ago.

Anyway, it all left me with some questions, but overall I liked the twist. It was great that the reason Serenity couldn't contact Alice wasn't because she'd lost her ability to communicate with the dead, but because Alice herself wasn't dead.

I was glad they expanded on the character of Thomas. After Jenna's introduced with her profound feelings of grief from losing her mother, compared with her nonchalantly referencing her father being in a "catatonic" state at a long term care residence (poor choice of wording from Picoult, he's more suffering something like dementia), I was worried that the focus on the mother would completely dismiss the influence of the father. But Thomas turns out to be a very nuanced character with a lot of importance to the plot.

Virgil's character was a little cringey at times. Picoult did some really great research, but she clearly doesn't understand how alcohol works. He reflects that once, when he was on a bender, he hallucinated that he was playing poker with Santa Clause and a unicorn. Then the Russian Mafia burst in. He ran to the ceiling and the unicorn told him to jump off and fly. He was one leg off when his cell phone rang, he came to, and realized he was one leg off the building. That's not... how alcohol works. Seems more like a hallucinogen.

Also, after he tells Jenna that he doesn't plan on dating Tallulah, Jenna says  "Then why are you acting like you want her to plug and play?" Ugh. Such an awkward way of saying that. She follows up with "Ride the bologne pony". It sounds like what women imagine men talk like when they're being vulgar, but I can't fault the book because it was a 13 year old girl trying to relate to a middle aged man, and Virgil was appropriately offput. It was just a cringey interaction.

Throughout the book, I experimented with theories like, maybe Nevvie lived and kidnapped Jenna, posing as her grandmother. The age would work, since she was a generation older than Alice and she'd lost her own child, so she might have stolen her to raise as "retribution" for Alice sparking the events of her own daughter, Grace's suicide. Of course, this theory was debunked when Nevvie was revealed to be "alive" and living elsewhere (actually dead, but the debunking stands because she was still discovered not to be the grandma).

I thought Alice might have been kidnapped herself, since there was so much speculation from Jenna that she must either be A) dead, or B), alive but not wanting to come home. I thought that having this framework spelled out for us was to hide an option C, she's alive but can't return. Of course, it turns out she can't "return" to Jenna, not because she's dead or doesn't want to, but because Jenna herself is dead. So there was an option C like I thought, but I missed the mark.

When there were theories about body swaps, I thought that maybe both Alice and Nevvie were alive, and the trampled body was actually Grace's, swapped in to fake someone's death.

Of course, all these theories were wrong.

By the end of the book I didn't like the character of Alice much. When she discovers that Thomas is mentally ill, I thought her choice to have his "research" painted over was a poor reaction, could have sent him into a meltdown. Surprisingly, it didn't effect him much.

There are discussion questions at the end of the book, and one asks about whether or not it was immoral for Alice to cheat on Thomas when Thomas was mentally ill, and sometimes abusive or absent. I personally think that's a pretty nuanced question, but what isn't nuanced is the fact that she cheats on him with Gideon, who is married to Grace, a close friend of hers.

Gideon's not faultless. He makes a move on Alice and she rejects him. That's unfaithful of him toward his wife, but it could be a moment of passion thing. Later, he makes another move and they sleep together. When they return to the camp, Alice asks what they'll say to Grace, and he says they won't say anything. Now he's made multiple moves and is being instructional, which all seems premeditated and predatorial. And the affair continues for a long time after this, maintaining the secret from both spouses. For Alice, she's desperate, isolated, burdened with motherly responsibility and afraid of an unhinged, abusive husband. She's betraying her friend Grace continually, but her desperation and fear evoke some pity.

For Gideon, he's cheating on his wife who is guilty only of not having been able to give him a child. She hasn't told him she's infertile, and she knows he wants a child. This is framed as her biggest character fault, but Gideon doesn't know she's hiding this so he's simply cheating. Also, I'd say Grace is guiltiest of the smallest sin, but pays the highest price in this story.

So Alice at this point isn't the guiltiest for actionable offenses, but where I began to dislike her was when Grace died by suicide and she reflected that this was her punishment for having cheated with Gideon. No Alice, you are not being punished with Grace's death, Grace was punished with death by your decisions.

She has a similar reflection about how Jenna wanting attention from her is punishment, because it reminds her of her responsibilities when she wants to be with Gideon. Again, Jenna isn't punishing you, that's just a child that needs attention.

Obviously Nevvie's actions were inexcusable. You can't kill a child for the behaviour of her mother, but she did deserve retribution for Grace. Honestly, I kind of prefer my theory of Nevvie kidnapping Jenna and raising her as her own to replace her daughter and to take Alice's away from her, maybe faking her own death by swapping out her body with Grace's, and that's why Alice can't return to Jenna, because they're in hiding. It would even explain why the grandma hates talking about Alice and never reported her missing, and why when she does open up, she says that Alice always did the opposite of what she wanted. But then not enough people would be ghosts.