Jodi Picoult, Keeping Faith
Faith White is an ordinary 7 year-old little girl whose world is shaken the day she comes home unexpectedly with her mother in the middle of the afternoon to find her father with his lover Jessica. Faith’s mother, Mariah, is even more crushed than her daughter, although she has to admit to herself she could have seen it coming, had she not spent many years in denial. It is not her first time her husband has been cheating on her: the first time, she was pregnant with Faith and had tried to end her life by slitting her wrists. But this time, Colin, who for many years has been trying in vain to explain to his wife that their relationship was going nowhere, has left the house and filed for divorce.
What could be a banal story of divorce and its aftermath takes an unexpected turn when Faith, after days of brooding and not talking, starts to have conversations with an imaginary friend she refers to as her guard. Worried, her mother takes her to a psychiatrist who finds the imaginary friend a sane way of coping until she understand that Faith has been referring to martyrs she couldn’t have heard about (Mariah is a non-practicing Jewish) and quoting the Bible. Her imaginary friend, it turns out, is not "guard" but "God",… and is a woman.
First treated for psychosis, it becomes evident that the little girl is not psychotic, and then she starts making miracles: unexplained healings, a resurrection, and later stigmata. Suddenly, everybody wants a piece of the little girl. People camp in front of her house, Rabbis and priests want to prove or disprove her visions, and the buzz around her takes huge proportions. The host of an atheist TV show, Ian Fletcher, is adamant he will prove that the little girl is a fake, manipulated by her mother, but it is before he actually meets her and her mother… To complicate things, Faith’s father, alarmed by what happens to her daughter, and not believing she has contact with God, now wants to fight for custody.
Keeping Faith is another interesting courtroom drama by Jodi Picoult, the specialist of the genre, and this time she tackles the controversial theme of religious faith and miracles. As usual, her novel is interesting and makes the reader want to go to the bottom of things. I particularly liked the character of Ian Fletcher, a man with a difficult past, torn between his atheist convictions, and his genuine need for a miracle, and I found Picoult’s portrait of a mother who feels inadequate and questions what it is to be a good mother particularly realist and convincing. The courtroom scenes did a good job showing all the possibilities behind Faith’s visions and stigmata, and the ending voluntarily leaves a room for speculation, which is a bit disappointing, but unavoidable when it comes to such a theme as faith…
On the minus side, I was not as involved in this novel as I was with Nineteen Minutes or My Sister’s Keeper, maybe because Picoult introduces many secondary characters, not as interesting as the main ones, and the frequent shifting of points of view sometimes becomes tedious. Also, Picoult took up a promising and ambitious subject but didn’t exploit it as thoroughly as she could have (like she did with medical ethics in My Sister’s Keeper, for instance). Where it touches religious beliefs and doctrines, the novel remains very superficial…
Rating: 3,5/5
Jonathan Coe, The Rain Before It Falls
The Rain Before It Falls is the story of two cousins, linked by a blood-sister pact made in childhood, and whose lives are laced with tragedy and pain, spanning over three generations. As the reader will have already understood, despite the fact that Jonathan Coe is the author, the tone of this novel is very different, there is none of the humor found in previous ones.
After her aunt Rosamond has died, Gill, a middle-aged woman with two grown-up daughters, spends time in her house in order to tidy up. In a cupboard, she finds a set of tapes recorded by Rosamond and a letter to herself, inside one of the boxes, instructing her to send all the tapes to Imogen, a young blind girl, remotely related to Rosamond, and that Gill remembers meeting once years ago. After days of searching, without result, for Imogen, Gill decides to listen to the tapes herself, and discovers a very sad tale unfolded by the voice of Rosamond.
Rosamond talks to Imogen and tells the story of the bind between herself and Beatrix, her cousin, when she was sent to live with her aunt, uncle and cousins in Shropshire, during World War 2. She explains how she came to be under the thumb of her manipulative and selfish cousin Beatrix, three years her senior, who was herself ignored by her brothers and father and unloved by her mother, who preferred her sons and her dogs to her. Later on, when Rosamond is a student living in London with the love of her life, another young woman named Rebecca, Beatrix comes to remind her of their bind and asks a favor that will change the course of Rosamond’s life…
The originality of the narration is that Rosamond unfolds the story by describing twenty photographs, which sum up, in her opinion, the story of her life where it is connected with Imogen’s origins. As well as serving as frames, so that Rosamond is not tempted to digress too much, the pictures are supposed to enable the blind woman to see: Rosamond wants to "try to describe whatever [she] sees in the photographs", she wants Imogen to have intrinsic knowledge of what her eyes could never see, and make her understand the tragic circumstances that led to her existence…
The story told is a circle of abuse and pain, repeated from one generation to the next, like a curse thrown upon a family. Coe’s view is particularly grim, since the ending offers no redemption, and this is maybe what is saddest about the novel: if there is a pattern, as there seems to be, it is not one we are meant to understand, just one we are meant to sense, but which meaning escapes us. By introducing the character of Gill, a loving mother, unconnected to the story, and tied to it only in her capacity as her aunt’s executor, Coe shows that Gill, even if she is empathic to the point of feeling the "supernatural" sometimes, is too much taken in her own life and worries, in the here and now, and with her own family, to become obsessed with a pattern that only concerns her peripherally…
A rather short and unsettling novel, a bit reminiscent of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, beautifully written, but that denies us closure, and in such a sad novel, I felt closure was needed. Very good, but grim, very grim, and not as impressive as the other novel I read by Coe (The excellent House of Sleep)…
Rating: 3,5/5
Sarah Wray, The Forbidden Room
Jenny is a young orphan missing both legs after a car accident that also killed her mother. From the orphanage where she stays, she watches her friends being taken into foster families, while nobody seems to want her. She is in love with Lee, another orphan, but she thinks that, because of her handicap, he will never think of her as anything but a friend.
One day, surprising news arrive: a family, the Hollands, have asked to foster Jenny. They had two girls who died from a disease which first disabled them, so their house is equipped for Jenny. Jenny’s first impression about the family is a very positive one: Mr Holland is nice but reserved, Mrs Holland is an artist who makes pottery and ocarinas, and she promised she will teach Jenny, who already has an artistic streak in her, about her craft. Stephen, the five-year-old son, is a very clever, cute and endearing boy. But underneath all the niceties and comfort, Jenny feels uneasy, she cannot quite put her finger on what is wrong, but some details make her wonder whether the Hollands have something to hide…
And indeed, one day, beneath a loose floorboard in her room, Jenny finds the diary of a young girl, and progressively learns the whole truth about the Hollands, a frightening and mind-blowing truth which puts everything she believes in question, and lets her face a huge moral dilemma…
The Forbidden Room is a very enthralling novel for young adults which won the Wow Factor. It starts slowly and builds increasing suspense, taking the reader in progressively. I do not want to spoil the story so I will not describe it further. I will just add that it is a clever novel for teens, which can be read and enjoyed by adults as well, and which raises questions for further discussions, about ethical problems that our society will have (or has already had, to a certain extent) to face someday…