"Vanishing Acts" by Jodi Picoult

Delia, expert at tracking lost people with her dog Greta and mother of four-year-old Sophie, is preparing for her wedding with Sophie's father, alcoholic attorney Eric, when her father, Andrew, is arrested for abducting her as a child twenty-eight years ago. With their best friend, journalist Fitz, they travel to Arizona where Andrew experiences the gangland hell that is US jail and Delia rediscovers her mother while preparing for the trial.

It's a typical Picoult story, told from multiple perspectives, in the present tense (which creates more tension by permitting the narrator, and the reader, not to know what's coming next) with twists all the way to the end, but I felt that the prison gang scenes and the Hopi Reservation scenes tangential to the main thrust of the story. They were a distraction. If I worked hard enough I guess I could unpick the metaphor linking them to the theme but the story of Andrew seemed designed to sensationalise, and critique the US fixation of crime and incarceration, and certainly diffuse any moral there might have been or any sense that the goodies won. But I suppose that was all on a par with the very post-modern message about truth and memory:

• "A witness is defined through what he sees, not what he says." (Part 1, Eric)
• "It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it and the one who believes it." (Part 2, Delia)

But it felt as if the jail scenes had been added either to spice up the narrative or because Picoult wanted to say something about society. There were other socio-political statements I thought were more subtly done:

• "I pass a plethora of child-care centres - the hallmark of a town whose inhabitants have to pawn their kids off on someone else so they can be teachers and nannies and cops in upscale neighbourhoods where they can't afford to live." (Part 2, Fitz)
• "I was one of the ghosthood of Mexican-Americans  who lurked in the background of other people's lives - as chambermaids and busboys and gardeners." (Part 3, Elise)

I also found the occupations of these characters a little too contrived. That Delia did search and rescue was a great metaphor but belaboured. As for Andrew, he has two useful skills: one as a pharmacist whose thirty year old studies are still so fresh in his mind that he can quote the recipe for crystal meth from memory; the other as a magician (another not-so-subtel metaphor)

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Picoult can write page-turners in which you are emotional;ly invested in the characters. There is a fantastic hook as the closing line of chapter one when Delia, as her father is being arrested for kidnapping Bethany Matthews, asks who she is and he replies: "You are." Wow.

There are several fabulously original descriptions:

• "Rearranging themselves like some kind of cog puzzle every time a new entrant arrives." (Part 2, Andrew)
• "I found myself watching a shaft of sunlight play Elise's skin like the bow of a violin." (Part 4, Andrew)

Other great moments:

• "This time, though, she wasn't leaving on her own behalf but someone else's." (Part 1, Eric)
• "Attentive mothers tended to be the ones with the most helpless babies: humans and chicks and mice." (Part 3, Delia)
• "When your mother is made out of dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you." (Part 3, Delia)
• "I knew men. My mother had taught me how to ... keep away the ones who only saw you as a single step, rather than a destination." (Part 3, Elise)
• "Not everyone understands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief." (Part 3, Elise)
• "For someone who can't remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can't forget." (Part 6, Delia)
• "We always say that children belong to their parents when it's really the other way around." (Part 6, Delia)
• "Most of us are just doin' life on the installment plan." (Part 6, Andrew)

May 2020; 420 pages

Other Picoult books I have enjoyed and reviewed in this blog are:
Songs of the Humpback Whale
Small Great Things