A Spark of Light - Jodi Picoult - 3*

[Elise]

Hugh is the hostage negotiator during an active shooter scene at a woman’s reproductive centre in the American South. This particular situation is special, because his teenage daughter and his older sister are two of the hostages. The story is told backwards, hour by hour going from the end of the standoff to the beginning of the day. In typical Jodi Picoult fashion, the story is told from multiple points of view, sometimes overlapping: the cops, the hostages, the shooter, and some random (at first) girl in the hospital.

I always admire Jodi Picoult for tackling the hard topics and expressing unpopular points of view, but this one was not one of my favourites. The backwards timeline often left me confused, thinking, “wait, shouldn’t this character be bleeding here? oh right that happened in the last chapter, so next hour...” I feel like there’s only one reason why it was written this way, one fact she wanted to keep hidden until the end, but there must have been other less confusing ways to do it. Plus I’d guessed the whole thing a few hours before we got there...

Another thing I felt a bit meh about was that we didn’t get a conclusion for everyone. We know physically where they end up because the end is in chapter one, but then we spend the book getting to know the characters in reverse, but in the epilogue we only get Hugh and his daughter. I would have appreciated getting a conclusion for everybody.

All in all, I love Jodi Picoult, but this was not my favourite.