Leaving Time (with Bonus Novella Larger Than Life)

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Thirteen year old Jenna is on a quest to find her mother who disappeared under mysterious circumstances when she was only three. In Jenna, [Jodi] Picoult has created an unforgettable character who will easily endear herself to each and every reader. The irony for Jenna is elephants remember everything but she cannot remember much about Alice at all.

The only helicopters most of these elephants would have ever encountered was 40-50 years prior, during the culls when they were captured and brought to the US. She tells us most of the back story; starting with her studies in Botswana and continuing all the way to the events of the night of the tragedy. I've never read this author before and now I have no plans to ever, ever read anything by her again. The other storyline follows Jenna's mother Alice, who worked first in Africa studying elephants, and later at an elephant sanctuary in the US.

I am so in love with Jenna trying to find her mother and Serenity and Virgil she picks up along the way. Nevvie, Grace's mother and Gideon's mother-in-law, is devastated by her daughter's death and enraged at Alice and Gideon. 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.

Because I promise you – once you read LEAVING TIME, you’re never going to think about elephants quite the same way. If you are the sort of person who skips to the end of a book to see what happens, please don’t do that with this book. Once famous for the work that she did helping people find their lost loved ones, Serenity is now a down-on-her-luck, has-been psychic. I tend to avoid that particular smelly, fly-invested area of the zoo, and rarely venture over for the demonstrations.

I loved the story, came to appreciate the inseparable bond between mother and daughter and learned a lot about the plight of elephants in the world today. For every elephant born in a zoo, another two die -- so even saying that zoos foster breeding programs is not quite accurate. She was a scientist who was doing field work at a reserve in Botswana to study grief among elephants and met Thomas Metcalf on his brief visit there.

Determined to uncover the truth of what happened to Alice, she sets out to retrace the events of that fateful night. Serenity Jones was a psychic; but her powers had been lost several years before after she famously gave the wrong information to grieving parents. They bring in characters that haven’t been mentioned throughout the story or they suddenly reveal clues that the reader wasn't privy to before, but not Jodi Picoult. While her herd ran away, terrified, Owalla greeted Randall, following his commands to lift her trunk and stay still so she could be treated by a vet without anesthetic.An intelligent young girl, she’s save up some money and begins to do her own amateur detective work, gathers clues along with other bits and pieces and, under the pretext of doing babysitting jobs, sets out to enlist the help of Serenity Jones and Virgil Stanhope, in the hopes that, together, they will be able to find Alice. I’ve always thought elephants walk as if they have music being piped into their heads that no one else can hear. Money from poaching fuels instability in Democratic African Republic, and there are rumors that Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army was funded with the proceeds of illegal ivory from the Democratic Republic of Congo. With plenty of twists and a surprising ending, [Leaving Time] explores the grieving process and what happens when we cannot move on. Sixteen years passed, and these two matriarchs managed to whip the teen elephants into herd formation, going without human contact for 16 years.