Leaving Time (with Bonus Novella Larger Than Life)

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Quando lemos um livro com demasiada informação, provavelmente pescámos um Kaluga, um Atum Azul ou um Acipenser Transmontanus. Jenna's father and Alice's husband, Thomas Metcalf, develops manic depression and is taken to a mental institution. I tend to avoid that particular smelly, fly-invested area of the zoo, and rarely venture over for the demonstrations. Because of all that remains unspoken, she hurts, like any child would, and desperately wants to get all the answers behind her mother’s abandonment.

The UN has created a resolution saying that poaching fuels instability in countries, and President Obama banned ivory trade in the US. Another example occurred in Pilanesberg, SA, a reserve existed for elephants that were orphaned after culls for population control. The odd yet determined trio set out to solve the mystery behind Alice's disappearance, unveiling bigger, stranger, and more ambiguous questions along the way.And I'm feeling cheated by the ending, because those two disparate storylines suddenly make more sense when you realise the author has set up the whole 400 odd pages just for the 'twist'. The Sanctuary was where Jenna had been born, where her mother and father Thomas Metcalf worked together, caring for their beloved elephants, and learning of the close familial bond which elephant families share. An elephant sanctuary sets the stage for this book, and I immediately fell in love with the stories surrounding the elephants and their histories- some happy, some tragic.

The book is narrated in the first person from the four alternating perspectives of Jenna, Serenity,Virgil and Alice and switches back and forth between the past and the present. As Jenna's memories dovetail with the events in her mother's journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish.I also gathered stories about evidence of elephant cognition and the unbreakable bond of elephant relationships. At first, Alice is skeptical, but Serenity is able to convince Alice that she is not crazy by telling her different trivial facts that were impossible to explain, as well as manifest Jenna's spirit into a mirror. I would never have imagined this book taking the turn that it did and it was just awesome, that is all I can say. Jodi’s new novel, Leaving Time, was released in the US, Canada, and Australia October 14, 2014, and in the UK on 4th November.

Serenity is a discredited psychic who Jenna enlists along the way, can she get her gift back long enough to get the answers Jenna needs? Her descriptions of elephant society make me love those animals while her emotional engagement with the two main characters, Alice and Jenna, made me care about them as much as they cared about each other. It’s even possible that the strong winds in Africa could blow a scattering of bones into a concentrated pile. At The Elephant Sanctuary in TN, an elephant named Jenny was living peacefully when a new elephant, Shirley, arrived. For one thing, she was chained to a giant cement block in the center, so that she couldn’t walk very far in any direction.Elephants are among the few species in this world (including humans) that show cross-species empathy – they will help out another animal in distress even if there is no biological advantage. I have loved Jodi Picoult's novels for a long time now, and am always eagerly awaiting the release of the next one.