Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel (Wsp Readers Club)

As a long time fan of Jodi Picoult, I do not know how I missed this book when it was first released because it is wonderful! I admit freely that there is a great deal of Egyptology and details of digging for historical purposes some of which is hard to get through; however, the story kept me reading despite this. The story is magnificent and worth the read by itself. As well, I learned about pyramids and the liike that I did not know and interested me. The woman who is the main character is not as strong as I would have anticipated needed for that job although when she was working on her degree she seemed stronger than in her ensuing years of losing her parents, marrying, and giving birth. She seemed to become almost robot-like in those years. Only when she took the chance and went back to Egypt did she exercise her true strength and even then she was reticent to speak up. When faced with the choice for how to spend the rest of her life when wrestled with it longer than I would have liked; but, she did make the decision and made it work. The story is magnificent and I recommend this book.

Swept away by simple description.Taken for a ride, that will last for a long time.Amazing characters that will stay long after I closed the book.

Although the story was interesting in regard to learning about whale songs and the variety of apples, I found the dialogue vague and the chapter sequence distracting. I felt it disrupted the cohesiveness of the story.The plane crash was not believable or well described. I did like the journey across the USA, although not totally believable with all the mishaps.

A uniquely written story. I, for one, have never read anything quite like it.This book tells a story about a family and two friends. There are five people in all. Each person's view is told throughout the book. Yes, as things happen, a person tells his/her view and another person who experienced the same thing tells his/her view. As different people speak, the font is changed so you can can hear them talking. It makes you sit and listen. It makes you hear what the person is talking about.To give you an idea, there is a family of three who live in San Diego. The father studies humpback whales, the mother works with special needs children in a school and the daughter is 14 years old. You will read about how the family acted/reacted to the happenings in their lives. Just imagine, reading a book where the daughter is speaking and you can feel her thoughts. Growing up, we never spoke up or shared our ideas. This is a book that shows you how it can work for you.In life, we each see, feel and hear things differently. We're unique. That is the basis of this line of storytelling. Jodi did a great job in telling the story.This is a book that will hold your attention from the beginning. One that will keep you wondering. It also has a bit of a surprise in it. It's a book filled with feelings.Thank you, Jodi!

Spoiler alerts.Jodi Picoult always tells an interesting story but this one is very disjointed. I'm also not sure what the book is supposed to be about. We have a pair of 25 year old studs, one of whom the main character is attracted to and the other, her daughter. Jodi Picoult has written some amazing female characters however I'm often disappointed that they are not usually her main characters. In this book it's the secondary female character, her daughter Rebecca, who I think is the more sympathetic one. Jane, the main character, like ones in so many of Picoult's other books, is not that nice to some of the most decent men in the story -- her 25 year old love interest, his best friend, and her younger brother. She leaves the love interest heartbroken and her actions result in the death of said best friend, which somehow, unbelievably, seems completely glossed over in this book. Her lover seems OK with it... I simply don't understand why this woman has her husband following her across country and has a young man and her brother also desperately in love with her. Speaking of the brother, there is a history of incest in the family with Jane's father, and it seems oddly echoed in her brother's incestuous although unspoken and chaste longings for her. It also casts Janes extremely dependent relationship with her daughter in a weird light. While not incestuous, Jane seems abnormally attached to Rebecca and exhibits the same visceral dislike of her daughter's love interest as her brother did so long ago with her eventual mismatched husband. Instead of fulfilling the normal parental role after this discovery and paying more attention to her daughter, she demands that her lover fire his best friend and send him away, something that ultimately results in his death. For such a devoted mother, it is also odd how she could have put Rebecca on a plane alone at the age of 3, how she was so unaware what stomach cramps would mean in a 15 year old who does not yet have her period -- I mean, c'mon, would that not be blaring on your mom radar?-- and that she continually emphasizes, almost to the point of obsession, how her daughter is her. It is never healthy when a parent sees a child as an extension or a replica of themselves. The last really strange inexplicable thing about this book is that there are some brief supernatural references that make no sense and are never explained -- a brother who can grow an apple from a blossom and a mother who can heal wounds and knit flesh before your eyes. It's out of the blue. Very odd. The book is good in the sense that you think about and wonder about these things but on the whole it is a mess and I had to struggle to stick with it.

It was a good book... Kind of confusing because it is five different people's perspective(that's not the confusing part) and four of them are talking from beginning to end of the story, but the teenage girl tells the story backwards, and that threw me off while I was reading, but other than that it was a good book! It was Jodi Picoult's first and I will say an awesome attempt at a first novel :) I had read most of hers before ever reading this, but it would have made me want to read other books of hers anyway :)

This book is told from five different points of view. It jerks back and forth through time, repeatedly telling the same incidents from the five main characters ' points of view. While the author has writing skill, it is overcome by the device of chewing every incident five times.It was sort of like reading the movie Groundhogs day, both boring and excruciatingly slow. Ugh!

I read this after reading a couple of other Jodi Picoult novels and then went back to the beginning and started following her. This is brilliant a beautifully written and a story of a family broken apart but need to learn to come back together.

je suis une fan inconditionnelle de Jodi Picoult dont je lis les livres dès leur parution,je vous les recommande tous.

Tracked the book down on Amazon. Quick delivery. Purchased book for a friend then asked her to give me it back so I could read it again. Read it several years ago but as I read so many books had forgotten how good it was.well worth it.

Hier ist ein weiteres Meisterwerk von Jodi Picoult. Ihr gelingt es immer wieder den Leser mitzureissen. Unglaublich. Und somit nur zu empfehlen. Viel Spaß beim Lesen :)

I lost a library copy and this came in quicker than stated. Thank you for having gently used books!