She just keeps getting better and better, does Jodi
Picoult, her novels always relevant and timely. Her title is based on a quote
by Martin Luther King Jr - 'If I cannot do great things, I can do small things
in a great way'. So not surprising that she is taking on the issue of race. But
her novel transcends just the concept of race as being how you are 'labelled'.
It goes much deeper, and looks more at the concept of personal identity, way
beyond the idea of skin colour being how we are defined and how we define
ourselves. It is simply a superb novel, with extremely complex ideas,
troublesome to many, that have been woven in into a first class story of
present day race relations in the US.
Ruth is a nurse, extremely competent, professional,
highly respected, working in a maternity unit of a hospital. She looks after
women in labour, during and after the birth, as well as the new born baby. She
is also black, proud of how she has made it in the white man's world,
intelligent, well educated, at the peak of her career. She is widowed, her
husband having died serving his country in Afghanistan, and she is the mother
of 16 year old Edison, a top student, also on the path to success.
One day she is working, helping a young couple who
have just had their first child. Turk and Brittany Bauer are white
supremacists, and take exception to Ruth being the nurse attending to Brittany
and the baby. So they insist that she not be allowed to have anything to do
with the baby or them. Naturally Ruth is extremely shocked, upset and angry.
But it would seem there is nothing she can do about this requirement. In an
unfortunate series of events - short staffing basically - the baby dies, and
Ruth is blamed for his death.
Suddenly she finds herself arrested, charged with
murder, her life completely turned on itself. She is a black woman charged with
murdering a white baby. Everything she had ever known about herself, the world
she lived in, her life programme, her self belief, her future for her son is
going to be ripped away from her. What becomes painfully obvious for Ruth as
the novel progresses is that she is and always will be a black woman living in
a white person's world. Her life, the life she has made for herself is really
just an illusion, her success is 100% defined by how well she has coped with
and adapted to the rules, the mores, the culture, the undercurrents, the
everything that is the world of the white person. She might think she has
successfully entrenched her place in her world, but in fact she hasn't and never
will.
Her lawyer is a public defender, a white woman,
Kennedy, who also finds herself on a very long and unexpected learning curve;
on the flip side, the public prosecutor is a black woman who is also confronted
with issues she didn't think she would need to think about. At the centre
of all this of course is newborn baby, dead from natural causes or
otherwise. And the bereaved parents.
Jodi Picoult is a genius in how she brings all this
together, and holds the interest compulsively for 450 plus pages. This will
stay with you for ages after, every time there is some race based controversy
in our society, or more particularly in the US, you will be reminded of this
book, of the message in it. It is good reading - the best reading is that which
makes us think, which makes us question, puts us in another person's shoes, and
that is what this does.
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