Vanishing Acts: A Novel

Vanishing Acts: A Novel
By Jodi Picoult


Product Description

How do you recover the past when it was never yours to lose?
Delia Hopkins has led a charmed life. Raised in rural New Hampshire by her beloved, widowed father, she now has a young daughter, a handsome fiance, and her own search-and-rescue bloodhound, which she uses to find missing persons. But as Delia plans her wedding, she is plagued by flashbacks of a life she can't recall...until a policeman knocks on her door, revealing a secret about herself that changes the world as she knows it -- and threatens to jeopardize her future. With Vanishing Acts, Jodi Picoult explores how life -- as we know it -- might not turn out the way we imagined; how the people we've loved and trusted can suddenly change before our very eyes; how the memory we thought had vanished could return as a threat. Once again, Picoult handles an astonishing and timely topic with under-standing, insight, and compassion.


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Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #3089 in Books
Published on: 2005-11-15
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
448 pages

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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Each of the five narrators in this excellent audiobook speaks intimately to the listener, capitalizing on the emotional complexity of Picoult's heart-wrenching tale. Delia Hopkins, read with simple grace by Gibson, immediately seizes the listener's attention when she relates how, on an ordinary day in smalltown New Hampshire, her beloved father, Andrew, is arrested for having kidnapped her, 28 years earlier, from the mother she long thought was dead. Delia's fiancé, Eric, and her best friend, Fitz (both of whom are given appropriately cultured New England accents), add dimension to this multifaceted exploration of love and identity, but Delia's parents, read by Jenner and Washington, offer the most noteworthy performances. Jenner successfully conveys the rainbow of personalities Andrew encounters while being held in an Arizona jail. Washington, meanwhile, embodies Delia's darkly tragic mother, who emerges as both a gentle healer with a dulcet Southwestern accent and a mother who was never there for her young child. Simultaneous release with the Atria hardcover (Forecasts, Feb. 7). (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
What better title than Vanishing Acts to describe a search-and-rescue worker who turns out to be a missing person herself, as well as the daughter of an amateur magician who makes people disappear? Reviewers praise Picoult (My Sister's Keeper ***1/2 July/Aug 2004) for her cleverness and her abilities as a storyteller, but her tendency to hang her narratives on Issues-with-a-capital-I has limited appeal. Her 12th novel seems particularly overcrowded with themes and subplots addressing the nature of identity, parental and platonic love, Native American mysticism, prison conditions, alcoholism, memory, and much more. The story is told in first-person narratives presented in alternating chapters by the book's five main characters, but this contrivance quickly wears thin. All in all, Vanishing Acts is a somewhat muddled effort from the best-selling author.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From AudioFile
Jodi Picoult's formula puts ordinary people in extraordinary dilemmas, the story told by the alternating voices of the people involved. Having different actors voice the major characters is ideal, and all here are excellent, from the supple but mature voice of paterfamilias Andrew Hopkins, who turns out to have kidnapped his daughter decades earlier, to the daughter, now known as Delia, who is a young mother herself. Picoult dovetails the narratives neatly and rations the plot turns expertly, building to a fine courtroom finale. One regrets that the cast list is given only on audio. Would it be impossible to give the actors credit in print, when it is due, as it is here? B.G. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


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Customer Reviews
Wow!
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3GHI59KML9GOJ What a great book for summer reading!

Did not receive.
I've been asked to wait and wait for this book to be delivered...a snail could have delivered it faster than this service.

Not Her Best Work
While I had previously read and enjoyed Second Glance and My Sister's Keeper, this novel has put me off Jodi Picoult books for a good while.

First of all, I have to say that I usually enjoy novels told from multiple viewpoints, but I do not care for Ms. Picoult's publisher's habit of using a different font for each narrator. The implication is that the reader isn't smart enough to follow the changing viewpoint without a change in font, and invariably I find at least one of the fonts difficult to read. In this case, the font used for Delia's fiance was so hard on my eyes that I started skipping his chapters.

Secondly, there was great potential in making Delia's profession "search and recovery," especially since she turned out to be a stolen child herself. Unfortunately, this aspect of Delia's life disappears after the first chapter. I wish it has been further explored.

Third, I found Delia to be strangely unsympathetic. Frankly, I didn't like her, and I didn't know why so many people were so devoted to her and why two men were wildly in love with her. Delia's daughter summed up her mother's personality when she precociously pointed out that, in restaurants, her mother would expect to sample someone else's french fries, but would refuse to share her own onion rings. Delia was self-centered, and that came through in every scene. One example is Delia demanding that her lawyer-fiance defend her father, and then flying into a rage when the fiance keeps certain aspects of his case confidential from her (as the judge had required, duh, Delia!).

Fourth, it seemed to me that suspense was achieved by having multiple scenes where no information was conveyed. The characters were constantly having conversations which would be cut short before any real information occurred. In one memorable scene, Delia drives something like 10 miles to have a confrontation with a parent, then storms off in a huff before more than a dozen words have been spoken. I found this frustrating and unrealistic.

Now, all of that said, the novel is worth 3 stars alone for the scenes with Andrew, Delia's father, in prison. Picoult's best character development and plotting occurs here, in what should have been a subplot but turned out to be more interesting than the central mystery.