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Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

Mein viertes Buch von Picoult ist der bisher am breitesten gefächerte - als ob die Kernstory von der Entführung noch nicht genug wäre, geht es hier um Alkoholismus, Gefängnisleben, Kultur und Traditionen der Hopi, mexikanische Hexen, die Arbeit der Rettungsspürhunde, die Authenzität und Manipulation von Erinnerungen - und alles wie immer unglaublich packend und nahegehend in einer faszinierenden Geschichte zusammengefaßt. So allmählich macht mich die Autorin süchtig.
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Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for in their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watches from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We're hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived.
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I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; although I'd squeeze hard, he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.
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"It just goes to show you," my father told me, on the last good day, "the world's only as big as what you know."
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I realize suddenly, that everyone is a liar. Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

(Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts, 2005)