The Tenth Circle - Jodi Picoult

...ISBN-13: 978-0743496711
Price: The recommended retail price at the shops is £6.99 although you can get it cheaper at WHS with their offers...having just checked it is available for £3.98.

Basic Plot:
The plot of the Tenth circle twists and turns a lot flicking between characters so that you get a different viewpoint on the events at hand, but you also go back into the past of the characters and see what it is they are ...
...epic masterpiece 'The Divine Comedy: The Inferno' which is where the title and much of the discussion in the book comes from which I shall go into more detail below...
In basic, Trixie is a 14 year old girl who has just been dumped by her boyfriend and is finding it very difficult to get it together, going out with her friend Zephyr to try to make Jason jealous they end up at a very rebellious party, at the end of this party Trixie is claiming ... more

I have gone through all of Jodi Picoult's books in a complete craze of insanity, I read one and I loved it, I read two and I've been hooked ever since. Personally I believe that this is one of Picoult's better works, but equally I love (nearly) all her books and it's difficult to choose. I did however think that this one was very clever for reasons I will explain below.

Boring Stuff:
Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Washington Square Press (October 24, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 074349671X
ISBN-13: 978-0743496711
Price: The recommended retail price at the shops is £6.99 although you can get it cheaper at WHS with their offers...having just checked it is available for £3.98.

Basic Plot:
The plot of the Tenth circle twists and turns a lot flicking between characters so that you get a different viewpoint on the events at hand, but you also go back into the past of the characters and see what it is they are hiding from others and from themselves.
The plot owes alot to Dante's epic masterpiece 'The Divine Comedy: The Inferno' which is where the title and much of the discussion in the book comes from which I shall go into more detail below...
In basic, Trixie is a 14 year old girl who has just been dumped by her boyfriend and is finding it very difficult to get it together, going out with her friend Zephyr to try to make Jason jealous they end up at a very rebellious party, at the end of this party Trixie is claiming that her ex, jason, raped her. This then leads into the complex discussions of what constitutes rape and whether Jason is truly guilty.
At the same time you have the story lines of her mother and father. And all these link in with sins and hell. Trixie's mother Laura is a top lecturer at the university - on Dante's inferno who is having an affair with one of her students and Trixie's father, Daniel, has a lot of ghosts in his path that he can't get rid of. With family life falling apart around them, and none of them truly ready to face up to the difficulties it's a novel of a family torn apart by sin and circumstances as well as a crime novel. When the rape suspect however turns up dead the novel takes on a more sinister turn and the reader is left guessing - Suicide or Murder? And then as Trixie does a runner there is a definite question of Who Did It?

This isn't a book quite like many of Jodi Picoult's...I was suprised for a start to find it had no court case scene which seems to be a standard in all of Jodi Picoult's books...but by far this one had more suspense. In all of her other books you know whose in the court and you have a fair inkling of what the end result is going to be - if purely for the sake of storytelling and keeping the reader happy! But this one was different, until I hit the page where it told me I had no idea how it was going to turn out, and I was suprised at the way it did...

Characters
Trixie Stone: A 14 year old girl going out with one of the most popular guys in the school, when he dumps her she goes through a very bad phase and starts cutting herself. Her friend in an effort to cheer her up invited her out to a party...after getting thoroughly drunk and playing some very sexual games everything gets slightly more nasty, as Trixie calls rape. The difference in character before and after she calls rape is drastic:
'The old Trixie Stone used to be a person who dreamed of flying and wanted, when she got old enough, to jump out of a plane and try it. The new Trixie couldn't even sleep with the light off.'
She is constantly victimised at her school as Jason is a highly popular sportsman and no one - not even her best friend believes her.
She is very well portrayed by Jodi Picoult, as a confused and scared teenage girl who maybe didn't say no, but definitely didn't say yes, and the events that follow in the book show a deeply scarred teenager but also someone with a heart of gold.

Laura Stone: Trixie's mother. A professor at a top university for a course of Dante and his 9 circles of hell. A fair amount of the book, including some of the most interesting debates are played out in her classroom. Much of the debates around the 9 circles of hell can be linked back to her and their prominance in the book is no accident. Laura is having an affair with a student of hers and avoiding her broken family...which links in directly with Dante:
'I don't get why being unfaithful to your king is worse than being unfaithful to your husband. If you have an affair you only end up in the second level of hell. That's like, getting off easy.'
Laura's role in the novel leads to questions about the roles and duties of parents and how far will a parent go to try to save their child from getting hurt...and how far SHOULD they go.

Daniel Stone: Trixie's father originally from Akiask, a cold and very much slower technology wise than America. Growing up he was the only white child in an Alaskan village and was taunted mercilessly for that. So he becomes the baddest of the bad boys...cheat, steal, and drinking, it is only when he gets married that he re-fashions himself into a devoted family man.
He is a deeply protective man who is desperate to keep his only daughter from harm and is devestated when this fails. At the beginning of the book you get the idea of an almost perfect family man, but it doesn't take long to realise that there is a hidden past to him, a past he keeps lcoked away very carefully. His job is a graphic artist and Jodie Picoult has added an inovative twist to this novel by including pages of graphic novel in the text, and an even more clever twist by hiding 2 or 3 letters in each page that when you find them all will make a quote summing up the nature of the book...what this is I'm not going to tell you - figuring it out is half of the fun...Dabbiel's fathers past however is shown on the pages of his sketchwork, it shows his desperate and fractured heart and how much his past has influenced him.
'The last man Daniel had beaten had already been dead. In the high school gym in Akiask, Daniel had slammed Cane across the floor, though his head already had a bullet in it. He'd done it because he wanted Cane to tell him to stop. He'd wanted Cane to sit up and take a swing back at him.'

Jason: Trixie's ex boyfriend. A highly popular sports jock, the question which is brought up by him is would the boy who used to make trixie's eyes light up for joy do that to her? And who's fault is it truly. He admits to consensual sex, but not rape. He stands to lose everything from this and you can't help feeling sorry for him, as to my eyes there's every chance that he at least believed that Trixie was willing...

Mike Bartholemew: A minor character in a sense but a highly interesting one in his own right. He is the police officer who is dealing with the case, and it was a neat touch by Jodi Picoult that he also knows the pain of losing a daughter.

Dante
As I have said before there are very close links and some very interesting discussion points raised in the book in relation to Dante's version of hell. His version of hell is mimicked everywhere in the book from Laura's classes, to Daniel's comics in which the lead character is on a hunt through hell to find his daughter. One of the most interesting points however is the title - The Tenth Circle. For anyone who doesn't know Dante, Dante only created 9 circles and that final 9th circle was for the betrayors to mentors - Judus who betrayed Jesus, Cassius and Brutus who betrayed Ceaser and Lucifer who betrayed God. Except Jodi Picoult toys with the idea of adding a tenth circle:
'If the worst sin of all was betraying others, then what about people who lied to themselves?
There should be a tenth circle, a tiny spot the size of the head of a Pin, with room for inifinite masses. It would be crowded with professors who hid away in ivy covered towers instead of facing their broken families...'
It's an interesting question and one that could make for much debate over whether Dante did miss out a sin in the modern world.

Graphic novel
The graphic novels throughout the book add a spice to the novel and was an idea I hfor one ahd never seen before...the comic marks its lead character - Duncan - going down through the levels of hell to rescue his daughter who has been kidnapped by Lucifer - the idea of a tenth circle is also used in this. The idea of humanity however is the theme that recurs in this, as Duncan can change into a wild animal whenever he is angry or afraid, except each time he changes he loses something of himself and keeps something of the animal instead. This shows Daniel's own fear about losing control, and about becoming what he once was, he is desperate to maintain his facade of perfect family man.

Rape
The way the rape is portrayed is clever, as at no point are you utterly sure who is telling the truth. It also brings to the fore the trauma of the collecting of evidence for a rape trail, which is absolute hell to go through and most people don't quite realise that. The aftereffects of rape are also well described as are those of losing a child:

'The absolute worst job, if you asked Mike Bartholemew, was having to go tell a parent that his or her kid had been in a fatal car crash or had committed suicide...there just weren't words for that kind of pain...The second absolute worst job in his opinion was dealing with rape victimes...And even if he could collect enough evidence to merit a trial, and even if there was a conviction, you could bet it wouldn't be for a very long time. In most cases, the victim was still in therepy when the rapist got done serving his time.'

And then the bit that really sums it up:
'The thing most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line of work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.'

Conclusion:
I really enjoyed this book like I have all the rest of hers, but some people have found it slow going...the characters are realistic and this means that they can get more annoying...but equally realistic characters is always a plus...I can see that it isn't the best of her books...but it is still a very good read... 

...less