She has done it again. I keep waiting for this lady to produce a mediocre book for, with some seven published over here in quick succession, one expects at least one to be poor ....... but no. Each tackles a nutty social problem, some perhaps a bit American, but nonetheless, all powerful human dramas. This one has the addition of a graphic novel within its pages, the father's relationship with his daughter the central theme. It adds an interesting dimension to a tale of date-rape, false, or not, accusations, suicide or murder ..... I'm not telling you. I just want to recommend yet another very successful Jodi Picoult. She is quite a find.
When Daniel Stone was a child, he was the only white boy in a native Eskimo village where his mother taught, and he was teased mercilessly because he was different. He fought back, the baddest of the bad kids: stealing, drinking, robbing and cheating his way out of the Alaskan bush where he honed his artistic talent, fell in love with a girl and got her pregnant. To become part of a family, he reinvented himself jettisoning all that anger to become a docile, devoted husband and father. Fifteen years later, when we meet Daniel again, he is a comic book artist. His wife teaches Dante's Inferno at a local college; his daughter, Trixie, is the light of his life and a girl who only knows her father as the even-tempered, mild-mannered man he has been her whole life. Until, that is, she is date raped . . . and Daniel finds himself struggling, again, with a powerlessness and a rage that may not just swallow him whole, but destroy his family and his future.
