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Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

Picoults neuestes Buch behandelt wieder ein überaus kontroverses und problematisches Thema - Schwangerschaftsabbruch - und mich wundert eigentlich nur, warum sie es noch nicht viel früher angegangen hat. Außerdem präsentiert sie es auch noch im Rahmen einer Geiselnahme, und als ich nach dem ersten Kapitel feststellen musste, dass die Geschichte rückwärts erzählt wird, und das auch noch nach einem richtig gemeinen Cliffhanger, der erst im Epilog aufgelöst wird, raufte ich mir schon die Haare. Im Nachhinein erkannte ich aber, dass die hergebrachte Erzählweise hier nicht so gut funktioniert hätte, viele Sachen, die in den letzten Kapiteln zutage kommen, hätten zuviel vorweggenommen. Das Buch muss ich auf jeden Fall noch einmal in Ruhe lesen, beim ersten Mal sind mir durch die nervtötende Spannung einfach zuviele schöne Stellen durch die Lappen gegangen.
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There was, of course, the history, too. Women had been property. Their chastity had always belonged to a man, until abortion and contraception put control of women's sexuality in the women's hands. If women could have sex without the fear of unwanted pregnancy, then suddenly the man's role had shrunk to a level somewhere between unnecessary and vestigial. So instead, men vilified women who had abortions. They created the stigma: good women want to be mothers, bad women don't.
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What she would miss were these details. She wondered if, when you left this world, you got to take a certain number of them deep in your pockets, clenched in your fists, or tucked high on the roof of your mouth, with you forever.
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He looked into the eyes of each of the women. Warriors, every one of them. Every day, he was reminded of their grit, their courage in the face of obstacles, the quiet grace with which they shouldered their troubles. They were stronger than any men he'd ever known. For sure, they were stronger than the male politicians who were so terrified of them that they designed laws specifically to keep women down. Louie shook his head. As if that could ever be done. If he had learned anything during his years as an abortion doctor, it was this: there was nothing on God's green earth that would stop a woman who didn't want to be pregnant.
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Today he was reading the research of a team from Northwestern University, who had recorded a zinc flash at the precise instant a sperm fertilized an egg. A rush of calcium at that moment caused zinc to be released from the egg. As the zinc burst out, at attached itself to small, fluorescent molecules: the spark that was picked up by camera microscopes. Although this had been seen before in mice, it was the first time in humans. More important, certain eggs glowed a little brigther than others at the moment of conception - the same ones that went on to become healthy embryos.
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As a resident, he'd sat with his share of terminal patients, and what you heard was true: people who were dying talked of a tunnel, with a warm glow at the end.
It stood to reason that both life and death began with a spark of light.
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She had come to the clinic because she didn't want to be a little girl anymore. But it wasn't having sex that made you a woman. It was having to make decisions, sometimes terrible ones. Children were told what to do. Adults made up their own minds, even when the options tore them apart.
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(Aus dem Nachwort)
The woman who had come in to have that abortion at fifteen weeks had three other children under the age of four. She could not afford another child without compromising the care of the ones she already had. Did coming to the clinic make her a terrible mother, or a responsible one?
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Laws are black and white. The lives of women are a thousand shades of gray.
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Honestly, I do not believe we, as a society, will ever agree on this issue. The stakes are too high, and both sides operate from places of unshakable belief. But I do think that the first step is to talk to each other - and more important, to listen. We may not see eye to eye, but we can respect each other's opinions and find the truth in them. Perhaps in those honest conversations, instead of demonizing each other, we might see each other as imperfect humans, doing our best.

(Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light, 2018)

Ross Wakeman succeeded the first time he killed himself, but not the second or the third.

(Jodi Picoult, Second Glance, 2003)
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Neu gelesen: (als E-Book)

Jodi Picoult, Second Glance

Obwohl primär eine Geistergeschichte wurden von Picoult wieder mehrere Themen zu einer faszinierenden Erzählung verflochten - Trauerarbeit, Vermont hinter den Kulissen der idyllischen Herbstlandschaften, mit einem ganz besonders intensiven Blick auf das Vermont Eugenics Project der 20er und 30er Jahre und dessen Auswirkungen auf die Abenaki, auf bizarre Weise miteinander verknüpfte Familienschicksale - das alles wurde zum Schluß so unerträglich spannend, dass ich das letzte Drittel fast in einem Rutsch auslas. Und das obwohl ich mich am Anfang noch schwertat in das Buch hineinzukommen, aber sobald die Charaktere erst einmal etabliert waren, ließ es mich nicht mehr los.
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Ross had gone to homes with the Warburtons where children had died of disease, or by accident. The mothers wore hope like mantillas, framing their faces as they waited for Curtis to give them back what they'd lost. In those cases, it was not moans and thumps and strange occurrences that had led to the call, it was the lack of them.
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She believed that unadulterated devotion had its share of protective power, as if love were a steel girder the Fates could not snip through. She also believed that the moment you relaxed your guard, the moment you were anything less than ferocious in your keeping, that was the moment it could all be snatched away.
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Shelby knew that some librarians felt the human brain was like a microfiche file, impossibly tiny images and words on transparent leaves, arranged page by page for a person's viewing pleasure. But every time she saw those miniature dossiers, she thought that if any part of the body were similarly catalogued, it would be the heart. She imagined autopsies, the organ sliced thin. One sliver would chronicle the way oyu had cherished a child; one would record the feelings you had for parents and siblings. Another, scarlet, might be etched with moments of passion; angels embracing on the head of a pin. And for those who were lucky, the thinnest slice would be teeming with memories of a love so strong it turned you inside out and left you gasping, and would be an identical match to a slice stored in the heart of a soul mate.

(Jodi Picoult, Second Glance, 2003)

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Jodi Picoult, Leaving Time

plus neu gelesen (als E-Book):
Bonus short story: Where there's Smoke

Ich weiß nicht, warum ich die Bonus Story über Serenity's Werde- bzw. Untergang als Medium erst jetzt fand, aber sie war nur ein Auslöser von vielen für mein Bedürfnis das Buch nochmal zu lesen. Hauptsächlich wollte ich einfach herausfinden, wie Picoult es hingekriegt hat, dass die Geistergeschichte trotz aller Argumente, die dagegen sprechen doch so überzeugend wirkt. Auch beim zweiten Lesen war sie noch tief bewegend.

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Jodi Picoult, Plain Truth

Endlich wieder ein E-Book, ich hatte es schon angefangen zu vermissen. Und endlich wieder ein Picoult, und dazu wieder so ein richtiger Knaller. Ganz abgesehen davon, dass es einen so tiefen Einblick in die Welt der Amish und ihrer Lebensanschauung gibt, war es wieder einmal sehr spannend und bewegend.
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I waited for Katie to make the connection, to say something about her own circumstances in relation to mine - but once again she surprised me. "You know what I noticed when I was with Jacob? In your world, people can reach each other in an instant. There's the telephone, and the fax - and on the computer you can talk to someone all the way round the world. You've got people telling their secrets on TV talk shows, and magazines that publish pictures of movie stars trying to hide in their homes. All those connections, but everyone there seems so lonely."

(Jodi Picoult, Plain Truth, 2015)

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Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

Ich hatte mir diesen Band kurz vor dem Urlaub auf den Paperwhite geladen, aber dann doch nicht auf Rügen gelesen - und das war auch gut so, weil die Story mir wieder so nahe ging, dass ich das Buch nicht aus der Hand legen konnte, was im Urlaub nicht so wirklich angebracht gewesen wäre. Faszinierend hier wieder wie Picoult das Unerklärliche greifbar macht und gleichzeitig ihre Story ganz unabhängig und eigenständig von der Wirklichkeit und dem Schrecken der wahren Ereignisse, die hier den Hintergrund lieferten, gestaltet. Wieder einmal ein anstrengendes, nahegehendes und fast verstörendes Buch.
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Everyone would remember Peter for nineteen minutes of his life, but what about the other nine million? Lacy would have to be the keeper of those, because it was the only way for that part of Peter to stay alive. For every recollection of him that involved a bullet or a scream, she would have a hundred others: of a little boy splashing in a pond, or riding a bicycle for the first time, of waving from the top of a jungle gym. Of a kiss good night, or a crayoned Mother's Day card, or a voice off-key in the shower. She would string them together - the moments when her child had been just like other people's. She would wear them, precious pearls, every day of her life; because if she lost them, then the boy she had loved and raised and known would really be gone.
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Dusty Spears understood kids like Drew Girard, because he had once been one. The way he saw it, bullies either were good enough to get football scholarships to Big Ten schools, where they could make the business connections to play on golf courses for the rest of their lives, or they busted their knees and wound up teaching gym at the middle school.

(Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes, 2007)

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Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

Obwohl die Taschenbuchausgabe mittlerweile billiger ist als das E-Book, konnte ich einfach nicht länger widerstehen und lud es mir auf den Paperwhite. Und - natürlich - lohnte es sich doch, nicht nur wegen der unerwarteten Enthüllung am Ende der Anhörung und dem völlig überraschenden Ende (das vermutlich vielen Lesern das Buch verleidet hat), sondern auch weil viele Nebencharaktere genauso bewegend und mitreissend geschrieben sind wie die Hauptpersonen, und Picoult es schafft selbst die am negativsten erscheinende Figur der Mutter sympathisch und verständlich zu machen.

Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed - sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.
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Mr Hume, my science teacher, taught us about the primordial soup full of natural gases and muddy slop and carbon matter that somehow solidified into one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates...which sound a lot more like a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary chain, in my opinion. But even once you get there, it's a huge leap from an amoeba to a monkey to a whole thinking person.
The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what yuo believe, it took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.
More amazing is how even though that's become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.
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When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recognize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point that wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.
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I try to work through the few things she has said, tracing them and trying to make sense of them the way the Greeks somehow found five points in the sky and decided it looked like a woman's body.
Then it hits me - I am looking in the wrong place. The Aboriginal people of Australia, for example, look between the constellations of the Greeks and the Romans into the black wash of sky, and find an emu hiding under the Southern Cross where there are no stars. There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.
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There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered telescope. Come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven yuong girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.
Make of it what you will.

(Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper, 2004)