A Spark of Light

I thought I knew Jodi Picoult. I vividly recall reading one of her books, Chocolat, and feeling enchanted.

Only Jodi didn’t write Chocolat. That was Joanne Harris. I had no idea.

So I was expecting something along the lines of Chocolat, all morality and community.

The strangest thing is I got exactly that.

Whenever I review books from NetGalley, I overlook the description so I can make up my own mind. The more you know about a story the less you invest, and that sense of surprise is significantly diminished.

Sometimes quite by chance you find a book that would have slipped by unnoticed yet matches beautifully the needs of your filter bubble.

But more often, it’s a book that you wouldn’t even contemplate reading.

A Spark of Light is such a book. A book that couldn’t have been written by anyone but Jodi.

The yarn is spun in a series of flashbacks from the moment a raging dad takes hostage an abortion clinic and its occupants.

The negotiator makes a harrowing discovery, we get closer than anyone except the medical profession might or should to the intricacies of surgery.

As a writer I’m always fascinated by the depth of discovery to which an author commits. I remember watching James Patterson’s Masterclass and him explaining that the majority of work on his books related to researching places, characters and the human condition.

Jodi must have spent months — practically becoming a de facto expert herself —delving into the minutiae of the pro-life, pro-woman spectrum.

Not just the mindset of the fanatics and the women finding themselves at the mercy of maddening circumstance, but also the methods both in clinical environments and in desperation, where one existence teetered on the brink of expiry while its passenger was in thralls of being lost.

I knew nothing of the fatalistic struggles of women wracked with guilt at the precipice of a life-changing decision. I’d heard about the pro-life extremists on a murderous rampage, but my knowledge again was scant.

In A Spark of Light — which gets its name from a flash of zinc about which you’ll learn in the book — us readers get an astoundingly architected story jackhammered into the soul, and an abject lesson in philosophy.

A Spark of Light is out 30 October 2018.