Book Blog #232: A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult

Title: A Spark of Light
Author: Jodi Picoult
# of Pages: 352 (hardback)
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary,
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Synopsis: The warm fall day starts like any other at the Center—a women’s reproductive health services clinic—its staff offering care to anyone who passes through its doors. Then, in late morning, a desperate and distraught gunman bursts in and opens fire, taking all inside hostage. After rushing to the scene, Hugh McElroy, a police hostage negotiator, sets up a perimeter and begins making a plan to communicate with the gunman. As his phone vibrates with incoming text messages he glances at it and, to his horror, finds out that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Wren, is inside the clinic. But Wren is not alone. She will share the next and tensest few hours of her young life with a cast of unforgettable characters: A nurse who calms her own panic in order save the life of a wounded woman. A doctor who does his work not in spite of his faith but because of it, and who will find that faith tested as never before. A pro-life protester disguised as a patient, who now stands in the cross hairs of the same rage she herself has felt. A young woman who has come to terminate her pregnancy. And the disturbed individual himself, vowing to be heard.
Review: This book sits somewhere between three stars and four stars.

A Spark of Light is not just a story of an abortion clinic shoot and hostage situation. It’s about all the people who are somehow connected to the situation and how they ended up at the woman’s center in that day.

What’s strange about this book is how it is told. The book tells the story BACKWARDS; it starts at 5pm and then works backwards hour by hour until it gets to 8am of the same day. I don’t know see the benefits in telling the story this way; it might reinforce the importance of the journey over the outcome. If this is the case, a better way to organize the story is to start with the 5pm hour like Picoult already does, but the go back all the way to 8am and go through the hours in order. Going backward only confuses the reader, leads to repeated information, and bores the reader as the time gets farther and farther from the main event in the book.

Of course, another big issue is the third person POV switching. Usually the fact that it’s in third person would make the POV switching more tolerable (Picoult said it herself, third person makes POV switching less confusing than if it’s in first person), but she using a whopping 10 characters’ POVs. And to think she initially wanted to including 8 additional POVs! I get that Picoult wanted to tell multiple people’s stories, but sometimes it’s better to keep it simple.

With this book, Picoult is trying to create a dialogue about abortion. However, it is extremely clear that Picoult is pro choice (most of the characters are pro choice). Picoult tries to present both sides evenly and fails; the pro life representation in the book is significantly weaker than pro choice’s. You can tell just by counting characters; the only people who are pro life are the gunman, a spy, and a prosecutor who’s a jerk. There’s still very interesting arguments in the book, but it didn’t feel right with the pro life side not fairly represented.

Books like this should leave you thoughtful. It should have you seriously considering the other side’s perspective. This book did not do that for me. If you are interested in the topic of abortion, go ahead and give this book a shot. However, I believe there are better books out there to learn about the topic.