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The Storyteller Jodi Picoult Books

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The Storyteller Jodi Picoult Books

**NO SPOILERS** I enjoyed this novel up until the last 20 minutes of audio (maybe 20 pages). I wasn't sure how interested I was in listening to a holocaust story, but I found it totally engrossing and I was hooked to see how the ending worked out. But Picoult did not deliver, and I really expect a writer like her to give a bit more satisfaction.

Let's face it. Jodi Picoult is an entertaining beach book writer with an incredible talent for unique plot lines and plot twists. But she is not Herman Melville. Or Evelyn Waugh. Or Thomas Hardy. When I threw "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" across the room out of frustration, I understood that Hardy's masterpiece made the upsetting outcome inevitable.

Jodi Picoult's dissatisfying ending was NOT inevitable. You can watch her manipulate the plot line all the way through the book and you spend about 100 pages, once you've detected the plot twist, waiting for the culmination, a meeting of two people after many years (not a spoiler, this becomes obvious pretty early on). Without spoiling, all I can say is that she REALLY disappointed me. Maybe she thinks she's being all artsy-fartsy high-end fiction where things don't always work out but this is not high-end fiction. All that engineering and she still couldn't even give us what we were waiting for? It still could have gone a number of different directions (things didn't have to go hunky-dory and I would have been fine with it) that all could have involved some sort of resolution, without being so horribly dissatisfying and unfulfilling as Ms. Picoult made it.

I also found that she did not resolve or deal with the main character's personal issues in any satisfying way. The main character has been in a terrible automobile accident (before the book begins) and is facially scarred from it. She also feels a lot of guilt over causing her mother's death in that accident. A big deal is made about how self-conscious she is about her looks and how guilty she feels about her mother. None of these issues are ever resolved in any meaningful way - she just falls in love and gradually starts showing her face, but we never see her truly deal with her feelings of guilt, and this too was unsatisfying.

Audiobook review: This is a multiple narrator recording. I can say that 3 out of the 4 readers were quite good. However, the narrator who did "Leo"'s point of view was just awful. He kind of used a stereotypical New York Jewish voice for his female characters, and his attempts to narrate the words of Sage (the main character) were just awful, sounded a bit like an old lady. Luckily his narration is not a huge part of the book. There are also a lot of pauses in the narration every paragraph or so in sections, as if the narrator took a lot of breaks and the producers didn't paste it back together very well. A little distracting at times, but generally a decent production.


Tags : Amazon.com: The Storyteller (9781439102763): Jodi Picoult: Books,Jodi Picoult,The Storyteller,AtriaEmily Bestler Books,1439102767,Literary,Psychological,Bakers;Fiction.,Friendship;Fiction.,Good and evil;Fiction.,Bakers,FICTION General,FICTION Literary,FICTION Psychological,Fiction,Fiction - Psychological Suspense,Fiction-Literary,Friendship,GENERAL,General Adult,Good and evil,PICOULT, JODI - PROSE & CRITICISM,United States

The Storyteller Jodi Picoult Books Reviews

This was well-written enough, but an utter slog to get through (I found myself speed-reading through Minka's italicized story within the story, within the story; it was too disjointly rendered). Mainly, I waited patiently to "get" Sage, including what was behind the facial scar issue -- all of her hiding. But I couldn't; she never came alive for me. [Mild spoiler alert coming up....] And then the surprise ending, the unilateral decision she made behind Leo's back, had me disliking her immensely. I get the symbolism of her action, but it wasn't necessary; the entire story itself made the "we're all capable of good and evil" point just fine. So, what did such a disappointing ending leave the readers with? The assumption that she went on to live out a grand lie for the rest of her life -- with Leo, particularly in light of what he does for a living? Minka's Holocaust story was most compelling; otherwise, just ... no, including all the loose ends. This was the first of this author's books I've read. Not sure I'll read another.
I've read a number of books about the Holocaust, so the historical events and many of the details were familiar. I also guessed the final plot twist a third of the way through the book. None of that mattered. The characters and their world were alive, and it was impossible not to care about them, even the worst of them.
After a day of digesting this novel I changed my rating from ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ stars to ⭐️⭐️⭐️ because the more I thought about it the more I had problems with this book. It was certainly different than most of her other books in that it didn’t involve a legal drama and/or courtroom outcome, and that was refreshing. But as I said I had some problems with the way the plot unfolded.

The themes of the book are redemption and forgiveness. Sage is the main character who works nights as a bread baker - nights, because she has a disfiguring scar on her face and prefers to be seen by as few people as possible due to embarrassment about the way she looks. But this doesn’t stop her from having an affair with a good looking married man. <Insert 🙄> She is asked by Josef - a 95-year-old former SS officer who worked in the Auschwitz concentration camp - to essentially help him end his life, aka killing him. He wants her to kill him because he doesn’t feel like he deserves to live after the atrocities he committed while working in the camp “just following orders.” (Boo hoo - I never felt an iota of sympathy for him.) So the first question that sprung to mind was why didn’t he just kill himself? Why choose her? (That question was finally answered but without spoilers I can’t go into detail.) The story is told through four different first person perspectives Sage, Josef, Leo (a federal agent who helps hunt down and prosecute on-the-lamb SS officers) and Minka (Sage’s grandmother who survived the camps.)

I did not remotely enjoy the story-within-a-story (hence the title “The Storyteller”) that Minka wrote while in the camps. These vignettes were interwoven throughout the book and while they paralleled the overall theme I thought they were superfluous and very boring. There was a big twist that unfortunately came as absolutely no surprise to me which was disappointing. What became of the relationship between Leo and Sage seemed incredibly unrealistic - another disappointment.

What it boils down to is that I enjoyed all four characters’ stories individually, just not as a whole. If she wrote four separate books about each of their stories that would have been preferable. There were several things I found completely unbelievable, but their individual storylines were well written, engaging and made me want to keep reading with the hope that the ending would tie everything together in a nice big bow. But sadly, for me, it just didn’t work out.
**NO SPOILERS** I enjoyed this novel up until the last 20 minutes of audio (maybe 20 pages). I wasn't sure how interested I was in listening to a holocaust story, but I found it totally engrossing and I was hooked to see how the ending worked out. But Picoult did not deliver, and I really expect a writer like her to give a bit more satisfaction.

Let's face it. Jodi Picoult is an entertaining beach book writer with an incredible talent for unique plot lines and plot twists. But she is not Herman Melville. Or Evelyn Waugh. Or Thomas Hardy. When I threw "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" across the room out of frustration, I understood that Hardy's masterpiece made the upsetting outcome inevitable.

Jodi Picoult's dissatisfying ending was NOT inevitable. You can watch her manipulate the plot line all the way through the book and you spend about 100 pages, once you've detected the plot twist, waiting for the culmination, a meeting of two people after many years (not a spoiler, this becomes obvious pretty early on). Without spoiling, all I can say is that she REALLY disappointed me. Maybe she thinks she's being all artsy-fartsy high-end fiction where things don't always work out but this is not high-end fiction. All that engineering and she still couldn't even give us what we were waiting for? It still could have gone a number of different directions (things didn't have to go hunky-dory and I would have been fine with it) that all could have involved some sort of resolution, without being so horribly dissatisfying and unfulfilling as Ms. Picoult made it.

I also found that she did not resolve or deal with the main character's personal issues in any satisfying way. The main character has been in a terrible automobile accident (before the book begins) and is facially scarred from it. She also feels a lot of guilt over causing her mother's death in that accident. A big deal is made about how self-conscious she is about her looks and how guilty she feels about her mother. None of these issues are ever resolved in any meaningful way - she just falls in love and gradually starts showing her face, but we never see her truly deal with her feelings of guilt, and this too was unsatisfying.

Audiobook review This is a multiple narrator recording. I can say that 3 out of the 4 readers were quite good. However, the narrator who did "Leo"'s point of view was just awful. He kind of used a stereotypical New York Jewish voice for his female characters, and his attempts to narrate the words of Sage (the main character) were just awful, sounded a bit like an old lady. Luckily his narration is not a huge part of the book. There are also a lot of pauses in the narration every paragraph or so in sections, as if the narrator took a lot of breaks and the producers didn't paste it back together very well. A little distracting at times, but generally a decent production.