Harvesting the Heart (1994)

At first at the start (the first 125 pages) i was bored out of my mind.Then the story picked a bit up and I thought it might be a good book after all, but no, the last 125 pages were ridiculous in a way. Totally not realistic and with too many contradictions. I still have 2 other Picoult books that I bought when i bought this one. Hope those 2 are better. ( )

This book was pretty good although the cover doesn't fit the book title very well. The story involves a woman, Paige, whose mother abandoned her when she was little and what happens after Paige has a child as well. The husband was a very irritating and overreacting character but overall, it worked.

I hadn't wanted to read another Jodi Picoult. After starting on the high note of My Sister's Keeper and working my way through a totally formulaic series always with a twist at the end, I didn't hold out much hope for this book but it was the only one I had for a long night in a hotel in a foreign land.

It was quite different in that it was distinctly overwritten, and in parts quite beautifully-written too. Usually I think of Picoult as a storyteller whose characters are somewhat sketchy ciphers that appear with different accoutrements in book after book, but the two main characters in this book were completely individual, perhaps especially the woman. Unfortunately nearly five hundred pages of two characters, one a bolter, the daughter of a bolter and one trying not very hard to escape his patrician family, gets boring without a good story.

The ending was pleasingly predictable instead of some manufactured codswallop like the ending of My Sister's Keeper and the rest, and I would have given it 3.5 stars if I could. ( )

great! ( )

Not a book I really enjoyed. There was a bit too much detail about Nicholas's career as a heart surgeon. Not that I'm squeamish, but I didn't think it advanced the story - seemed like so much filler. And I found his reaction to his wife's post-partum depression completely unconvincing for a medically-trained person. Paige's drawings were the most interesting part of the book, with their hint of magical realism, but they didn't seem to add much to the plot, either.

And, just as an aside, I read the ebook and it was a really poor conversion: lots of OCR errors, and a whole chunk of repeated text at one point. ( )