If You Love Elephants, Read These Two Very Different Books
Noble creatures in fiction and non-fiction
Jodi Picoult’s Ability to Blend Fact With Fiction
I can’t help myself. I love it when an author weaves scientific facts into the mental membranes of a fictional book. Jodi Picoult did it with Lone Wolf, a 2012 book I enjoyed because of the fascinating research on wolves and the contemporary plotlines revolving around fractured families and end-of-life issues. Mostly, I loved how much I learned about wolves and their behavior.
But if elephants are more your thing than wolves, have I got a find for you! Leaving Time, a Jodi Picoult novel released in October of 2014, is the story of Alice, a woman who has devoted her life to the study of elephants. In particular, she’s observed their responses to grief, their ability to remember, and their steadfast protection of the calves of the herd.
Leaving Time
A compelling storyline drives Leaving Time. The novel’s primary narrator is a teenaged girl named Jenna, Alice’s daughter, who is searching for answers to what happened to her mother. Alice mysteriously disappeared after an accident at the elephant sanctuary when Jenna was three.
