Second Glance: A Novel - Hardcover

Picoult, Jodi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743454502 ISBN 13: 9780743454506

Publisher: Atria Books, 2003

Synopsis

This breathtaking novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult asks: Do we love across time, or in spite of it?

“Sometimes I wonder....Can a ghost find you, if she wants to?”

An intricate tale of love, haunting memories, and renewal, Second Glance begins in current-day Vermont, where an old man puts a piece of land up for sale and unintentionally raises protest from the local Abenaki Indian tribe, who insist it’s a burial ground. When odd, supernatural events plague the town of Comtosook, a ghost hunter is hired by the developer to help convince the residents that there’s nothing spiritual about the property.

Enter Ross Wakeman, a suicidal drifter who has put himself in mortal danger time and again. He’s driven his car off a bridge into a lake. He’s been mugged in New York City and struck by lightning in a calm country field. Yet despite his best efforts, life clings to him and pulls him ever deeper into the empty existence he cannot bear since his fiancée’s death in a car crash eight years ago. Ross now lives only for the moment he might once again encounter the woman he loves. But in Comtosook, the only discovery Ross can lay claim to is that of Lia Beaumont, a skittish, mysterious woman who, like Ross, is on a search for something beyond the boundary separating life and death. Thus begins Jodi Picoult’s enthralling and ultimately astonishing story of love, fate, and a crime of passion.

Hailed by critics as a “master” storyteller (The Washington Post), Picoult once again “pushes herself, and consequently the reader, to think about the unthinkable” (Denver Post). Second Glance, her eeriest and most engrossing work yet, delves into a virtually unknown chapter of American history—Vermont’s eugenics project of the 1920s and 30s—to provide a compelling study of the things that come back to haunt us—literally and figuratively. Do we love across time, or in spite of it?

About this title

Review:

Ghosts and ghost hunters collide in this compelling tale of the paranormal set in Vermont's green mountains. When the patriarch of the Abenaki Indian tribe that was nearly eradicated by that state's eugenics project in the 1930s encounters Ross Wakeman, the miraculous survivor of several attempted suicides who wants nothing more than to be reunited with the woman he loved and lost, they set in motion a chain of events that will unravel an ancient murder and lead to a second chance at life and love for the victim's descendants. Picoult, author of Salem Falls, brings the past alive and peoples it with a cast of extraordinarily well-realized characters whose reach into the future touches the lives of a dying boy, a frightened girl, and their mothers--two women who've given up on love until the revenants stirred up by a plan to develop an ancient burial ground show them what they're missing. Second Glance is an intricate and suspenseful ghost story that enchants and illuminates all the way to its powerful conclusion. --Jane Adams

About the Author:

Jodi Picoult received an AB in creative writing from Princeton and a master’s degree in education from Harvard. The recipient of the 2003 New England Book Award for her entire body of work, she is the author of twenty-six novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers House Rules, Handle With Care, Change of Heart, and My Sister’s Keeper, for which she received the American Library Association’s Margaret Alexander Edwards Award. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children. Visit her website at JodiPicoult.com.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743454502
• ISBN 13: 9780743454506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432