Ten years after her mother went missing, Jenna sets out to find her with a retired detective and a psychic. Put them all together with the excerpts on elephants, weave a story and the blow it out of the water with an unexpected ending.

I knew that giraffes had four stomachs and that the leg muscles of a locust were 1000 times more powerful than the same weight of human muscle. I wouldn’t characterize myself as a tree hugger but I do love the natural beauty of the great outdoors and have a passion for observing the flora and fauna of my environment. Just in case there are any film producers who read this (you never know), I think this book would make an excellent movie. Elephants are among the few species in this world (including humans) that show cross-species empathy – they will help out another animal in distress even if there is no biological advantage. The “present-day” events incorporated a mystery element investigated by an unlikely team of a discredited psychic, a washed up detective, and a thirteen year old.The cast of characters was quite the motley crew of misfits, but I grew to love them all individually. She is also the author, with daughter Samantha van Leer, of two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page .

I read "Where There's Smoke" and "Larger than Life" both prequels to "Leaving Time" I'd highly recommend reading them first as they give a real insight into 2 main characters. But somehow, Picoult has managed to do what she does so well with human characters – present them as a hodgepodge of flaws, quirks and strengths that give the reader no choice but to believe in their existence – with elephants, too.There will likely be mistakes in most of my reviews but I've decided who cares it's my opinion that matters in my own review right? Thirteen year old Jenna Metcalf is determined to find out what happened to her mother, Alice who disappeared from her life when she was just three years old. The second is Virgil Stanhope, a jaded private detective who originally investigated Alice’s case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues.

We need to continue to spread the word about poaching, as Tusk and the Clinton Global Initiative have done. Was tempted to give up reading several times but went back to it and did eventually finish reading the entire book. I literally had to spend the first few minutes before starting my shift at work, sitting in a stunned silence after finishing this book.However, Owalla got bitten by a hippo 16 years later and couldn’t be anesthetized for medical reasons. At the same time, those who demand ivory need to be educated about the reality of poaching -- many believe that an elephant can regrow a tusk, which is not true; the only way to get an elephant tusk is to kill the elephant. I now want to go back and read it again, to spot the clues, as I'm sure they were littered throughout, and will now be more obvious, having read the book once. I recognise Jodi Piccoult is a fantastic and prolific author, and have enjoyed a couple of her books before now. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

But Tina died, and when she did, Sissy stayed with her – and then remained by her grave for a few days. Nevvie, Grace's mother and Gideon's mother-in-law, is devastated by her daughter's death and enraged at Alice and Gideon. Their grieving rituals are remarkable too – an elephant will have a change in behavior if it comes across the bones of another elephant – getting quiet and reverential, and the tail and ears droop. There are a couple of anomalies that bothered me a little, but as I can’t describe them without giving away some critical plot points I had better leave them alone. Local governments need to see that the cost of losing tourism will far exceed the immediate cash flow of poaching elephants, and need to create punishments for poachers that reflect this.I have no idea if I would reread this book ever again in my life but I am happy that I finally found the time to read another book from Jodi Picoult. Finding herself pregnant she decided to take him up on his invitation to visit him in America and the rest, they say, is history. The last quarter gets more into the story and less into the comparisons of elephant to human, and does pick up, how ever Picoult always throws in an unseen twist, and this one did not leave me going, no way! A deeply moving, gripping, and intelligent page-turner, Leaving Time is Jodi Picoult at the height of her powers.