Jodi Picoult: Leaving Time

Since reading Nineteen Minutes I've been looking to read another book by Jodi Picoult, and I also loved My Sister's Keeper, so I had pretty high hopes.  It took me a while to find one that took my fancy while flicking through the Amazon Kindle store, but I'm a sucker for a good thriller so a missing Mum sounded good to me!

Jenna Metcalf was with her mother the night she disappeared, but she remembers nothing.
In the wake of those tragic events, she has lost not one parent, but two: her father is in an asylum, and now she lives with her grandmother - who finds it too painful to talk about what happened.
Ten years on, Jenna is the only one who still seems to care. And she is determined to seek the truth, no matter how shocking and life-changing it might be . . .

This book was so different to what I would usually read, but I really enjoyed it.  The books follows two stories side-by-side, which have a clear link from pretty early on in the story.  As always, Jodi Picoult has written beauifully; the characters were put together in such a lovely way which made you really hope they found what they were looking for and it's a really well-researched book, especially the elephant research although this does occassionally drag on unnecessarily.  There is a lot of information about elephant behaviour which I know a lot of readers haven't enjoyed, but I found the plot line interesting enough to keep me intrigued. There was a preeeetty big unexpected twist, and towards the end of the book the pace increases a lot, I read the last third of the book in one sitting because I just couldn't get enough.  A large part of the story revolved around a psychic medium which was a little far-fetched, but still not enough to put me off.

Although this isn't as good as some of the other books I've read recently, it's definitely worth giving a go, especially if you're a Jodi Picoult fan.