Audio Book Review: Leaving Time

Title: Leaving Time Jodi Picoult
Publisher:Random House Audio
Length:15 hours 11 minutes
Narrator: Rebecca Lowman, Abigail Revasch, Kathe Mazur, Mark Deakins
Format: Audible Audio book

Synopsis: For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.

Desperate to find the truth, Jenna enlists two unlikely allies in her quest: Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons, only to later doubt her gifts, and Virgil Stanhope, the jaded private detective who’d originally investigated Alice’s case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues. As the three work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they realize that in asking hard questions, they’ll have to face even harder answers.

(28)Review: The way this book was written reminded me of Picoult's book Lone Wolf: A Novel in the way she shares how animals, Wolves, in Lone Wolf and Elephants in this novel interact to shed light on human behavior, better yet how animals seem to be more compassionate than humans.

I loved this book, The narrators really brought it to life and it felt more like a play than a book. Weaving together stories told by Jenna who is desperate to figure out what happened to her mother, Serenity who is struggling with losing her psychic gifts but feels that helping Jenna might bring them back, Virgil who has lost hope in life and whose life seems to have gone downhill ever since he worked on the tragic accident at the elephant sanctuary, and last but not least Alice tells her story from when she first met Jenna's father until she disappears.

The story is hypnotizing and I couldn't stop listening.  I felt like Jenna desperate to find out what happened to Alice. The ending shocked me to my core, and was not at all what I was expecting but I won't spoil it for you.  Once again Picoult didn't disappoint and has written a fabulous unexpected and heart wrenching book.  This is definitely a book that is going to stay with me for a while.