Do You Know Jodi Picoult?

It's the weekend, and I've been indulging myself by reading just for fun.

I recently participated in chat on a loop where we were discussing our favorite authors. Jodi Picoult's name came up, which reminded me to mention her here.

I bought my first Picoult book, Keeping Faith, in 1999 after reading a review in the Dallas Morning News. I was so taken with the book that I emailed Picoult and was tickled when she responded. Like a total fan geek, I asked her about her writing process.

She was very gracious, saying that most of her books begin with the question, "What if . . ." In Keeping Faith, the question was "What if a child began holding conversations with God?

For those of you not familiar with that book, it's the story of a Jewish woman named Mariah who is going through a painful divorce (she found her husband in their bed with another woman). Her seven-year-old daughter Faith suddenly develops an imaginary friend that she calls "Her Guard." Mariah is at first baffled and then frightened when Faith begins quoting passages of the King James Bible--a book that the non-believer Mariah has never made available to the child. When Faith develops stigmata, a custody battle starts between Mariah and her estranged husband who blames Mariah for their daughter's "health" issues. Then miraculous healings
seem to occur in the vicinity of Faith, and all hell breaks loose. Does the child need a psychiatrist, a priest or just to get away from her feuding parents?

Jodi's 2004 book was My Sister's Keeper about a young woman named Kate who has leukemia. To keep Kate alive, her parents deliberately conceived another child named Anna from whom they could harvest what was necessary. The book begins when Anna--now thirteen and tired of being an involuntary donor--walks into a lawyer's office to ask for help in stopping all the medical procedures. The book is written from multiple POVs--a common device in Picoult's books--so that you can follow how Kate, Anna, their mother, father, brother and the attorney are thinking and feeling.

Jodi's fourteenth book, due out in 2007, is Nineteen Minutes about a Columbine-type shooting in a high school. Her fifteenth book will be Change of Heart, which Jodi describes thus: "It features a Death Row inmate who wants to donate his heart to the sister of his victim. . .which means petitioning the state for a less 'humane' form of execution than lethal injection. When he starts performing miracles, the press labels him 'Messiah'. After all, people are always finding Jesus in prison. . .what if he were really there? And what if the things he said didn’t match what you’d been told your whole life. . .but instead, matched verbatim the text of an ancient gospel that was excluded from the Bible as heresy?"

As you can tell, Jodi operates a bit like the television show Law and Order, taking themes directly from the news.

I really recommend her books to you. Start with the two I've recommended here, and I promise you'll be hooked.