Leaving Time (with Bonus Novella Larger Than Life)

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There is a lot of information about elephants but I actually found myself fascinated by the things I learned.

In hopes of finding more information, they go visit Thomas Metcalf, who reacts violently when seeing Jenna in the necklace. He wouldn't survive without the trunk, so a decision was made to have the Wildlife Management folks euthanize him.There are a couple of anomalies that bothered me a little, but as I can’t describe them without giving away some critical plot points I had better leave them alone. She is on her own and ends up enlisting help from two dubious characters; Serenity who was once a celebrity psychic with the ability to talk to spirits but whose skills are rusty now as her two spirit guides seem to have have forsaken her, and Virgil Stanhope, an ex-cop turned private investigator who was on her mother’s case but missed some of the clues and who is now a miserable alcoholic on account of the botched investigation. Alice and Maura, Metcalf’s favorite elephant at the sanctuary and the one elephant that seemed to form a very strong, almost personal bond with Alice, share a tenacious and unbreakable love for their daughters even when thousands of miles separate them from physical touch and companionship. We need to continue to spread the word about poaching, as Tusk and the Clinton Global Initiative have done.

Full of the deep characters and multilayered story lines that have earned [Picoult] a spot in many readers' hearts. The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve. I would never have imagined this book taking the turn that it did and it was just awesome, that is all I can say.

Jenna Metcalf was just three years old when she last saw Alice and has spent a decade longing to be reunited with mother, or at least finding out what happened to her. When he failed to solve Alice's disappearance the first time, he tried to kill himself, but didn't realize that it worked. Told in two parts from the POVs of Jenna, Alice, Virgil and Serenity, the first part builds up to a confrontation with Jenna’s father, Thomas, whilst the second part begins to unravel the mystery surrounding Alice’s disappearance.