Harvesting the Heart is one of Jodi Picoult’s earlier
novels. It is about a woman named Paige. Paige grew up with only a few memories
of her mother. When she was five years old, her mother abandoned Paige and her
father. Paige decides after graduation that it is time for her to leave her
father and the city she grew up in, Chicago, after dealing with a challenging
decision. Paige leaves and dreams of attending art school. While gone she meets
and marries Nicholas, an ambitious young doctor. Soon after Paige becomes a
mother herself to a son. She quickly feels overwhelmed with the demands of
having a family and she cannot get past the fact that her own mother left her
and was absent most of her life. She also struggles with her own past and the
reason behind why she left Chicago and her father in the first place. She is
unsure of herself as a mother and as a wife and so in a moment of desperation
leaves everything in search of answers.
This story was hard for me to get into. I usually love
Picoult’s writing style, but in this particular story, I found she jumped
around time frames too much, especially in the beginning of the book. I was
constantly trying to figure out what was going on. Luckily after the first part
it became a bit easier to follow and the flow was much better.
This story deals with such a fragile topic of ambivalent
motherhood. I think all moms can relate to feeling overwhelmed in the
beginning. It’s a completely new life and you need to adapt rather quickly. But
I think that’s where most moms, at least in my case, stop relating. I could
never in a million years ever consider leaving my children and it was hard for
me to understand why Paige could do that to her own son. But Picoult does do a
good job in putting you into Paige’s shoes and seeing it through her eyes. You
really have to have empathy in order to understand the emotions that she is
going through, especially, if like me, you find it unthinkable to just get up
and leave.
Picoult does a good job of writing from the perspectives of
both Paige, the mother, and Nicholas, her husband and the father of the child.
You really get a sense of what both of them are feeling and the struggles they
each have to deal with. But as I already said, I had a really hard time
relating to the characters and what they were going through.
Overall I found this particular novel to be lacking what
most of her other novels have. It took me a long time to really get into it and
when I did, I couldn’t relate much to what I was reading. The story line was a
bit predictable and there weren’t really any twists or surprises. It was an
interesting read, but not one of my favourites.
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