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Jodi Picoult, Harvesting the Heart

Wie alle Picoult-Bände fand ich es anfangs schwierig hineinzukommen, bis die Charaktere und die Story mich nicht mehr losließen und ich das Buch am Ende nicht mehr aus der Hand geben mochte. Und danach war ich einmal mehr beeindruckt wie verständlich und nachvollziehbar Picoult Verhaltensweisen darstellt, die zunächst unerklärlich erscheinen.

He said that most of those Harvard types thought the diner's name was some kind of philosophical statement, and anyway, that kept them coming in. He wandered off, leaving me to wonder why white people named girl babies things like Hope and Faith and Patience - names they could never live up to - and black mothers called their daughters Mercy, Deliverance, Salvation - crosses they'd always have to bear.
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I was starting to see that the past might color the future, but it didn't determine it. And if I could believe that, it was much easier to let go of what I'd done wrong.
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I thought of all the magazine articles I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, See how lucky you are? But it had been gnawing at me inside, that part that didn't quite fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?
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But on the other hand, Nicholas couldn't help but remember that marriage was a man-made thing, a statute created by society itself. Two souls that were meant to be together - and Nicholas wasn't saying that was the case with him; he was too scientific to be so romantic - well, two people like that could just mate for life with no need for a paper certificate. Marriage didn't really seem to be about love; it was about the ability to live together for a long period of time, and that was something completely different.
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Still, no matter what, leaving home had to do with more than just me. It may have started out that way, but I was beginning to see how many chain reactions had been set off and how many people had been hurt. If the simple act of my disappearance could unravel my whole family, I must have held more power - been more important - than I'd ever considered.
Leaving home was all about us. I realized this was something my mother had never stopped to learn.
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(Jodi Picoult, Harvesting the Heart, 1993)