Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult Spoiler Free Review

★★★★.5

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Release Date: 11th October 2016.

Pages: 512

Genre: Adult/Contemporary

Buy (in order of lowest to highest price as of 10.12.16): Book Depository, Amazon, Barnes and Noble.

When a newborn baby dies after a routine hospital procedure, there is no doubt about who will be held responsible: the nurse who had been banned from looking after him by his father.

What the nurse, her lawyer and the father of the child cannot know is how this death will irrevocably change all of their lives, in ways both expected and not.

Small Great Things is about prejudice and power; it is about that which divides and unites us.

It is about opening your eyes. – Goodreads.

√. I loved the writing in this book. Seriously, Jodi Picoult has a beautiful writing style and manages to pick the perfect words to describe things. It made the book fly by, despite it being over 500 pages. It took me around three days to complete, in which time I was also doing college work and writing so that really is saying something.

√. Pretty irrelevant to the writing but the book itself is beautiful. Just look at that cover.

√. There isn’t one character that isn’t well-developed in this book. From our protagonist Ruth, to her lawyer Kennedy, to even Kennedy’s young daughter, each of them had their own different personalities and ideologies and I loved it.

√. Because of these developed characters, the multiple perspective worked very well. An issue I have sometimes with multiple perspectives is that there is one perspective that I don’t like and I just want to get back to those I do, but that didn’t happen at all. I even enjoyed being inside Turk’s – white supremacist , skinhead, swastika-tattooed guy suing Ruth because of her race –  head.

√. Onto Turk. He was a really great character from a writing perspective, not as a person for obvious reasons. He wasn’t just a mindless villain for us to hate, Picoult made him so that he was a human being mourning the death of his baby son and had his own motivations for acting the way he did. Him and his wife, Britt, were such interesting characters to read about.

√. Really, the reason this book is so great is because of its message. Small Great Things is being named as the modern day To Kill a Mockingbird as both deal with inherent racism and discrimination. Emily May on Goodreads wrote a great review talking about how this book isn’t just shoving ‘don’t be racist’ down reader’s throats, it’s about making white people aware of the privilege we have, and that when we hear the word ‘person’ we immediately think of them as being white. It’s hard to swallow but I do think this book has opened my eyes and made me more aware. It’s powerful, emotional, and for me, a wakeup call.

✘. One aspect I didn’t like was the ending. Though I can see how it is necessary for the message of change to be hammered home, it just didn’t sit right with me just how much that character changed without being able to see it for myself over the time that elapsed.

Other than that, I loved it. I’m so glad to have found this book (considering I got the hardback for £3.99!!) which has led me to discover a new author I thought only wrote books made for charity shops and my mother. I won’t make that mistake again.

Thanks for reading,

Have a great day,

Abby.