Leaving Time (with Bonus Novella Larger Than Life)

Touching and engaging, the story will stay with me for a long time as will the insights on the elephants

Elephant is an emotional, intelligent asset. I condemn the background the author has used to promote their social behaviour - From Kruger!

Its a wonderful book! A great combination of emotion & mystery!! Don ever miss the chance to read this beautiful story.

Awesome book to improve English and also very interesting

Cool

When I began this book, I felt as if I could sink into the story, in the hands of a master storyteller, and I did enjoy it, right up until the end, when I felt annoyed; tricked, even. But I'll get to that (and I'll be sufficiently discreet to avoid spoiling it for you.)First, the good. The protag is engaging, and so are all of the other characters. Picoult knows how to entertain, and when she has the failed celebrity psychic and the loser detective team up to help Jenna, it's a winner right there. Alice, the mother, is compelling, as is Thomas and the rest of the team at the sanctuary. The world of elephants is very interesting to learn about, and moving. The descriptions of Africa were so beautiful I read them aloud to my husband.The writing is intelligent, even LOL funny in places. Big themes are addressed. In fact, in the beginning I was enthralled by the idea that we'd be looking at questions like these: Is there an afterlife? What benefit is there in defaulting to the negative if we'll never know the truth? How do you answer the scientifically unanswerable questions? Even the questions posed about elephant culture are intriguing. These are all marks of quality in a novel.But the ending, for all the nicely paced denouement and gratifying tears I shed, was not my cup of tea. It diminished the joy I had originally felt in reading. I even went back and read the last 15% of the book again, because I wanted to see if I could reconcile my new understanding of the truth with the scenes that now had to be viewed in a new light. Could I read them again and say, "Oh, aha, Picoult never actually SAID blah blah blah. That was my inference. How skillful of her!"No. In a second reading I just got more aggravated. The scenes and the story only make sense until you read the ending. And they don't. It's not like the rereading opens your mind to a new, broader way of looking at the world. There are whole pages of scenes that now seem more like a creative writing exercise than part of the story.So why did I give it four stars? Because the writing deserves it, regardless of my view that the ending corrupts the story in retrospect.

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