I have read a bunch of books by Picoult and other than Songs of the Humpback Whale I have liked them. This one was a whole new level of story telling by this author.
My overall thought is that I liked the book and found the story timely and interesting. That being said, I had to put this one down at times and look away, catch my breath even. Some parts were just so hard to read and made me angry.
Picoult mastered here the weakness that I found in Humpack, she writes her chapters from the voices of three main characters, Ruth (the nurse), Turk (the dad), Kennedy (the lawyer), and manages to capture three distinct and recognizable voices.
The chapters from Turk's point of view are particularly hard to read. Turk is a hate filled white supremacist. His wife gives birth and Ruth is the nurse that comes on duty and gets assigned to care for his family. And that is not ok with him. He demands that "her and people who look like her" not be allowed to touch his child. This demand is followed by the supervisor and puts Ruth in a difficult spot when she is in the room alone with the baby when he stops breathing....What comes next is a legal drama but more than that it becomes a conversation on race and privilege.
Kennedy is faced head on with her white privilege and must face her own biases and it is a hard thing to do. She has to face the face that racism isn't always as overt as the kind shown by Turk, it is more often more subtle and sometimes the person with the bias isn't even recognized by the person with it.
While there are parts of this book that are, as I said, hard to read, it really is a well done and I would even say important read.
(Finished April 16, 2018)
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