Leaving Time

Memory of Elephants

Sara Gruen’s Like Water For Elephants gets top of the mind recall when it comes to books about the pachyderm. Jodi Picoult has thrown her hat into the ring with her bestseller, Leaving Time, which has a story of family, respect for life and an unbroken mother-daughter bond, woven around the world of elephants, which is closer to that of humans than we might imagine, especially when it comes to maternal love and grief.

Since two of the lead characters in the book are elephant researchers, it has an impressive amount of information on elephants, which is not in the least boring.

Thirteen-year-old Jenna Metcalfe, lives with her grandmother, and is haunted by vague memories of the night when her mother disappeared, and her father ended up in catatonic state in a mental hospital. Her parents ran an elephant sanctuary in New England, for circus or zoo animals nobody could care for. As can be expected, funds were tight and expenses immense. One night, there is a tragedy at the sanctuary and the little girl is left with just a haze of grief and a heap of her mother’s journals.

  

A decade later, now a precocious teen, Jenna wants to find out what happened; even if her mother died, she needs to know and get closure.

She hires Serenity Jones, a once-famous psychic at the end of her powers, and a grumpy, alcoholic private detective, Virgil Stanhope, who was the cop on duty when the incident took place.

Picoult’s characters speak in their own voices and all have their own torments to bear. Jenna, is the perky teen. “Let’s talk for just a second about the fact that my grandmother is going to ground me until I’m, oh, sixty. I left her a note, but I’ve purposely turned off my phone because I don’t really want to hear her reaction when she finds it,” he says when she stows her way across to another distant town in pursuit of a lead. She is a little too smart for her own good, but utterly lovable.

The introduction of Serenity is an obvious indicator of some supernatural ingredient being stirred into the pot, and the end is a complete shocker, though not so much to those who have seen a certain famous Bruce Willis film. Any more, and it will be a major spoiler. A really enjoyable read, this one.

Leaving Time

By Jodi Picoult

Publisher: Ballantine

Pages: 405