How is your Christmas season coming along? I finally got our tree up on Sunday. With a crazy kitten, I’m not sure how long it is going to stay up…
We have had at least one year where we didn’t get the tree up until Christmas Eve, so I’m at least ahead of that. December is a busy time, and a difficult time for many.
Check out this year’s Christmas posts so far:
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.
I quite enjoy Jodi Picoult and the way that she portrays her characters, each individuals with unique backstories and relationships. And she is not afraid to tackle difficult issues, as you’ll find when you read this one!
I am currently reading A Spark of Light, which juxtapositions an armed hostage situation with the very personal situations the various women and men are facing.
She shouldn’t have come to the Center.
She should have stayed a little girl.
Because now she might not live to become anything else.
—Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light
At Mississippi’s sole remaining women’s reproductive services clinic, a gunman bursts in and takes its patients and staff hostage. The stories that brought these individuals to the clinic vary, from a woman awaiting cancer screening results to a protestor hoping to catch the clinic in a scandal that could be used in a pro-life campaign. Then there is the police hostage negotiator, whose daughter is also trapped inside the facility, and the gunman himself, who has a vendetta to carry out. Meanwhile, across the state, a seventeen-year-old woman lands in the hospital after an attempt to self-terminate her pregnancy and is subsequently charged by the pro-life DA for the murder of her unborn child. They, too, are connected to the events unfolding in the clinic.
As the book moves backward in time, each chapter set one hour earlier than the last, we learn how all these people and their stories are unwittingly connected–and that none of these characters’ reasons for being where they are at this fateful place and time are exactly what it appears at first glance.
