Thank you for reading my reviews ^.^ I'm always happy to rate back.
Thank you for reading my reviews ^.^ I'm always happy to rate back.
Member since:04.08.2008
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Mercy by Jodi Picoult 449 pages Modern fiction
Another Jodi Picoult book to add to my review list! Although I found this one a bit disappointing compared to Picoult's other works.
Maggie and Jamie are living an almost fairytale marriage life, until that is Maggie discovers she is suffering from cancer. With no hope of surviving it Maggie asks Jamie to kill her, he wants to end her pain so he smothers her with a pillow. Jamie takes the body to his cousin's home town, wanting to be punished for the crime. Jamie's cousin is Cameron Macdonald, the police chief. Allie, Cam's wife, believes that Jamie does not deserve to be punished. The two have already been divided on thoughts though when Cam 'falls' for Allie's assistant Mia..
From the blurb on the back of the book, I believed the story would be focused on mercy killing but instead it barely touches upon the subject, instead the book is more about Cam and Mia's secret relationship and infidelity. I found it slow reading for the first couple of hundred pages but it began to pick up when scenes of Jamie's trial appeared. It is written in third person with one page of first person written in letter form inbetween chapters (although it's hard to tell which character is writing the letters.) There were also several parts of the story, which involved the characters seeing ghosts or reliving memories of their ancestors that were very unbelievable.
The characters were hard to relate to and several were very dislikable, sometimes I felt nothing for them. The only characters I did care about were Allie and Jamie and what would happen to them.
There are several good points to this though, near the end which had Jamie's trial scenes it had me gripped, there was good descriptions about the atmosphere of story scenes and I did start enjoying the storyline half way through it, probably will read it again but after awhile when I've read some of her better works.
Characters: Jamie Macdonald: Maggie's devoted husband, not much is written about his own feelings at the beginning but nearer to the end you get to read the emotional torment he was going through, I found him a likeable character who I felt had loved too much for his own good.
Allie Macdonald: Her character is slightly one dimensional at the start of the book, the typical cliche housewife but her personality changes halfway into the story and I began to enjoy reading about her more, some parts of her were life like while others weren't.
Cameron Macdonald: I found him very selfish throughout Mercy and wanted to skip to the next chapter but to my dismay found he was in almost all of them! I still read all of it of course but I found slow and almost like doing maths. Most of the parts involving Mia was with Cam but she hasn't imprinted her character onto my mind completely, can barely remember what her personality was like.
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Apr 5th, 2009
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