Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult
As a first time reader of Jodi Picoult, I didn’t know what to expect when reading the book. Would late nights be in the future, or would the book get shoved in a corner and never get read again? After reading the first chapter as the reveal was made, I knew the book would be read until it was finished.
Vanishing Acts starts as Delia, after a long day of work (she helps find missing children with her bloodhound, Greta), answers the door to the police from the New Hampshire town she lives in with her father, Andrew, her fiancé, Eric, her daughter, Sophie, and her best friend, Fitz. The police have arrived to arrest Andrew on kidnapping charges occurring 28 years ago in Arizona. Delia discovers that her father kidnapped her when she was four years old after he divorced her mother. She also discovers that she isn’t named Delia, but Bethany Matthews. “Why are you doing this to him? How could you be so mistaken? But the one question that comes out, even as my throat is closing tight as a sealed drum, surprises me. ‘Who is Bethany Matthews?’ My father does not take his gaze off me. ‘You were,’ he says.” This comes as a shock to Delia because she has no recollection of her former life. All she remembers is living with her “widowed” father in New Hampshire.
As the book progresses and the trial starts in Arizona (where the crime first took place), Delia reunites with her mother and recovers part of her memory about what happened before she was brought to New Hampshire. “Eric”, I announce, “I remember.” The revelations that Delia has as she starts to remember what happened when she was younger are shocking and make readers wonder “Can you really forget something that major?”
One major theme that applies in this book is whether or not kidnapping a child if one parent isn’t able to take care of the child is an acceptable reason to take a child. By the end of the book, the answer to that question is given by the judge and jury in the traditional trial sense, but also makes readers think about what they would do in the same situation. The book makes you wonder what would happen if you simply packed up and vanished in order to start over again in a town where no one knew who you were. The feel of the book is the gasp that involuntarily leaves your mouth when a new plot twist is revealed every so often.
Picoult does a good job of developing her characters. By the end of the book, I want to reach into the book and hug Delia because of what happened the last few months, slap Eric because of what he did during the trial, and tell Andrew I think he did the right thing. However, she constantly drops “plot bombs” and by the end of the book, it’s hard to keep everything straight that happened in the book.
This book leaves you turning the page until you reach the end, and once the end happens, you want to smack yourself on the forehead for one event that happens in the book and exclaim “I should have known!” The book is for someone who wants to possibly form an opinion on something that no one wants to think about for long, and this book isn’t for those who don’t like court room dramas, because there certainly is a lot of that in the book. I award this book 4.5 stars out of 5. The book was good, but there were too many surprises for me to handle in almost every chapter.
