What's Been Wead...

Sheesh - each Tuesday I get to work and think, man this week is dragging.. it's only Tuesday?!


And then I blink and it's Friday...


 Anyways - So Monday night I finished My Next Book from The Really Big Book List (aka the 2015 Reading Challenge)

as a reminder:

Last week, I'd finished A Book Set in the Future : The People of Sparks (by Jeanne DuPrau).

This week's Check Mark belongs to A Book from an Author You Love but Haven't Read Yet : Lone Wolf (by Jodi Picoult).

(and I'm sorry to any English majors - or just OCD sticklers - I've probably mis-Bolded/Underlined book titles...)

Jodi Picoult is probably one of my favorite authors - almost all of her novels (that I've read, which now includes Lone Wolf! and I think there's only 1-2 more of hers that I've yet to read) - they all have this plot twist, or big reveal at the end...

((SPOILER ALERT for any Jodi Picoult books!) lol)

For example, in My Sister's Keeper, which is now a movie with Cameron Diaz, a young girl is basically conceived and born to be a donator (bone marrow, stem cell, etc) for her sick older sister... after years of donating, she begins a legal case to be medically emancipated from her parents so she can discontinue the exhausting procedures and donations.
As her family falls apart - her mother declares she's murdering her sister, her parents begin to fight, and her sister falls more sick - the book's end reveals that it's the ill sister who pushed and forced her sister to begin the medical emancipation process... It was the sick older sister who was just tired of fighting a battle for her mother, who wouldn't, couldn't let her go...
((Another beef with the whole book-to-movie thing is that in the book, minutes after winning the medical emancipation case, the younger sister gets in the car with her lawyer and is in a fatal car accident... In the movie? The donations stop, and the older ill sister spends her last days at home with her family before she passes away... BOO.  I loved the ironic hot-debate ending of the book!))





OMG ok, back to Lone Wolf...
In this book, there is a man who has spent his life studying wolves - a man who spent two years in the Canadian wilderness sleeping, hunting and living with a pack of wolves.  After a car accident with his daughter, whom he has custody of after the wolves came between him and his ex-wife, he's in a vegetative state.
When his son Edward, self-exiled in Thailand and teaching ESL, receives the phone call, he rushes home state-side and becomes embroiled in a battle against his own sister.  She wants to hang on, keeping their father on life-support because, despite the doctors' very poor prognoses, her father, the might wolf man, might return!  And he wants to pull the plug.

The first chapter is the occurrence of the car accident and so the rest of the book is alternated between the brother, sister and an assigned Public Guardian narrating chapters, interspersed with the father, Luke's words about his wolf studies - the first time he lost a pup, the first time he was accepted by a wild pack, etc.  I am somewhat a light reader, and so I didn't realize until a few chapters in that the Wolf Chapters were always tying back into the story going on - the tug & pull of his daughter and son on whether to continue life-sustaining support... Chapters about the alpha wolf in a pack, and how when he/she is gone, a member within the current pack will most likely step up...
I liked the parallelisms drawn by these Wolf Chapters, although a few times my brain just didn't want to have to work extra to make the connection (I read late at night!)

Overall, excellent book! (And of course, there is a "WHOA!" moment at the end that helps explain why the daughter and son each held their position of Life Support or Pull The Plug.)


Next up (and what I fell asleep reading last night, so the Nook and I shared a pillow!) is:
A Funny Book : What Alife Forgot (by Liane Moriarty)