Weading Wednesday - which category?!

I know - two posts one day! But you see, Holy mother of everything that is holy.... 

I just finished one of the best books I've ever read, and I raced over to my laptop and just HAD to do my "Weading Wednesday" entry.  Now.

Because - 

Best.

Book.

EVER.

Seriously.

 My eyes are still swollen and tear-streaked, my brain is still reeling from the ending, and I'm mourning the fact that reading this book for The First Time is officially over and can never be re-done...

The voraciousness with which I turned each page (or, flicked to the next page on my nook...) is unrivaled by nearly anything I've ever read before - certainly nothing that comes to immediate mind.

The synopsis on any bookstore/reading site will tell you that it begins with a teenager named Jenna, looking for her mother (Alice) who mysteriously disappeared 10 years prior, after a tragic accident at her elephant sanctuary...

An intriguing plot summary, to say the least.  Having loved Jodi Picoult as an author for awhile now, I didn't hesitate to add this to my must-read-list and figured I'd find some category on my 2015 Reading List to throw it into, some check box I could check once I finished it.

Reading list be damned...

Even before the most incredible ending you've ever come across in a Jodi Picoult book (and that's SAYING SOMETHING!) I was breathless at the words she used, the stories she aligned:

Between the mother's elephant research - how they grieve, the mother-daughter relationships, "all-mothering" and the training female elephants go through for years before becoming mothers themselves - and the mother-daughter relationship in absentia playing out between the main character (teenaged Jenna) who desperately searches for her mother... (although there isn't even really a typical "main" character - the chapters' narration bounces between Alice, Jenna, Serenity (a psychic who was introduced in Picoult's "Where There's Smoke" who has "lost her touch" but is helping Jenna) and Virgil (a long-retired detective who had handled the fatal accident years prior at the sanctuary).)

I teared up at an Africa elephant who, during the course of Alice's research, so preciously, tenderly and shamelessly mourned her stillborn calf - the heartbreak when the new mother realized the sad truth, and that Alice could tell alone "by the set of head, the sag of her mouth, the wilt of her ears.  [Everything about her] looked deflated..."

How familiar that feeling, how well I could empathize - recalling the soft, "I'm so sorry, I don't have good news for you..." and my own realization of the sad truth...

Another favorite quote/section of mine - so favored that I stopped reading to grab my phone and take snapshots, jotted the words down...

"If you are a mother, you must have someone to take care of. [...] If that someone is taken from you, whether it is a newborn or an individual old enough to have offspring of his own, can you still call yourself a mother?"

(and of course, my vigorous nodding - "Yes! YES YOU CALL YOURSELF A MOTHER!")

The last few chapters - thank god E was at the hockey game tonight (which was cute, I told Button Daddy was watching hockey - to which he responded, "Haw-Teeeee!")  because I bawled.  Like, ugly cried.

I threw up my hands and said, literally out loud - "WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?!?!"

and uttered, "Oh...  Mai...  GAWD!!!!!"

and I bawled some more...

bottom line?

GO READ THIS BOOK.  

but do it alone, because you will cry your ever-loving face off..... 

((If you want an .epub version for any e-reader, let me know!))