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LEAVING TIME

by Jodi Picoult ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 2014

The ending borrows unforgivably from a source it would be equally unforgivable to reveal.

A decade after the disappearance of an elephant researcher, her 13-year-old daughter, a washed-up private detective and a has-been psychic team up to find answers.

As in  Lone Wolf , (2012) Picoult uses fiction to illustrate the plight of animals who are being decimated by humans, in this case elephants who are endangered by everything from poachers to circuses. Teenage Jenna, daughter of missing-scientist Alice, launches a search for her mother, who vanished from the hospital after being found unconscious on the grounds of a New Hampshire elephant refuge where a co-worker was fatally trampled. Jenna's father, Thomas, has been in a psychiatric hospital since the incident, and she lives with her grandmother, who refuses to discuss Alice’s fate. Jenna shares narrative duties with three others: Virgil, a police detective –turned–drunken private eye whose law enforcement career crashed and burned as a result of the botched investigation into the trampling death; Serenity, a clairvoyant, who was a national celebrity until her spirit guides deserted her in the middle of the search for a senator’s kidnapped child; and Alice herself, who details past events leading up to the pivotal crisis. As a young graduate student doing fieldwork at an African game preserve, Alice studied the grieving rituals of elephants, which include revering the bones of departed ancestors and burying deceased loved ones with leaves and grass. In Africa, Alice recognizes a kindred spirit in a visitor, Thomas, who runs a New Hampshire sanctuary for abused elephants rescued from circuses and zoos. She joins him there, marries him, gives birth to Jenna and begins to question her husband's sanity. Thus the seeds are sewn for a thriller that involves noble pachyderms, adultery and a breathless chase across several states. The pages turn apace, though Virgil labors under too many noir clichés, and wisecracking Serenity seems to be on loan from a Susan Isaacs novel.

Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-345-54492-6

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014

LITERARY FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

by Jodi Picoult

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

by Mark Z. Danielewski

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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clock This article was published more than  9 years ago

Book review: ‘Leaving Time’ by Jodi Picoult

The enigmatic elephant — a favorite of writers from Sara Gruen to Rudyard Kipling — has lumbered its way into bestselling author Jodi Picoult’s new novel, an entertaining tale about parental love, friendship, loss — and, well, elephants.

" Leaving Time " is set partially at a New England elephant sanctuary and in the savannas of Africa, where herds of wild elephants roam. When the novel opens, 13-year-old Jenna Metcalf is searching for her mother, Alice, an elephant researcher, who disappeared 10 years earlier in the wake of a tragic accident at the sanctuary. In hopes of finding clues to her whereabouts, Jenna mines detailed journals her mother kept about her work. It's a lonesome quest: Her father has been in a psychiatric hospital since the incident and her grandmother, who has been taking care of Jenna, doesn't "want to go there," Jenna informs us. So Jenna solicits the help of Serenity Jones, a disgraced medium, and Virgil Stanhope, a hard-drinking private detective.

Jenna is particularly tormented by her inability to remember details of the night her mother disappeared. There’s an irony, of course, that the wise teen Jenna is quick to point out: “You know the old adage that elephants never forget?” That truism is based in fact, Jenna explains, and her mother’s research proved it. Another area of her mother’s research — elephant grief — also resonates clearly in a personal way. When an elephant calf dies, its mother often refuses to leave her offspring’s body for days. Jenna knows that passage from her mom’s journal by heart. “Sometimes,” she says, “when I am bored in class, I even write it in my own notebook, trying to replicate the loops of her handwriting.”

Such poignant moments are often flecked with Jenna’s authentic-sounding teen voice. “Let’s talk for just a second about the fact that my grandmother is going to ground me until I’m, oh, sixty,” she tells us about her decision to skip town in pursuit of her mom. “I left her a note, but I’ve purposely turned off my phone because I don’t really want to hear her reaction when she finds it.”

Unfortunately, though, Jenna’s witty voice is interspersed with passages narrated by less engaging characters. Alice in particular comes across as clinical, and the entries from her journal, though informative, occasionally read like a zoology textbook, while the rest of novel is a melting pot of genres including mystery, romance and the supernatural.

Picoult mostly manages to blend all of these diverse elements into a cohesive whole, wrapping up her tale with an ending so surprising that she has asked reviewers not to reveal spoilers on social media. Suffice it to say that readers of “Leaving Time” are unlikely to forget these formidable animals that are so different from us in appearance but so similar when it comes to saying goodbye to those they love.

Gillespie is a novelist and teaches writing at Georgia Regents University.

LEAVING TIME

By Jodi Picoult

Ballantine. 405 pp. $28

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Leaving Time : Book summary and reviews of Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

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Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

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Published Oct 2014 416 pages Genre: Literary Fiction Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

Throughout her blockbuster career, #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult has seamlessly blended nuanced characters, riveting plots, and rich prose, brilliantly creating stories that "not only provoke the mind but touch the flawed souls in all of us" ( The Boston Globe ). Now, in her highly anticipated new novel, she has delivered her most affecting work yet - a book unlike anything she's written before. For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice's old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother's whereabouts. Desperate to find the truth, Jenna enlists two unlikely allies in her quest: Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons, only to later doubt her gifts, and Virgil Stanhope, the jaded private detective who'd originally investigated Alice's case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues. As the three work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they realize that in asking hard questions, they'll have to face even harder answers. As Jenna's memories dovetail with the events in her mother's journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish. A deeply moving, gripping, and intelligent page-turner, Leaving Time is Jodi Picoult at the height of her powers.

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Media Reviews

Reader reviews.

"The pachyderms are as complex as the humans, making the journey memorable and poignant." - Publishers Weekly "Best-selling, reliably entertaining, and thought-provoking Picoult's newest multifaceted novel is redolent with elephant lore that explores the animals' behavior when faced with death and grief, and combines a poignant tale of human loss with a perplexing crime story that delivers a powerhouse ending." - Booklist "A truly engaging read that crosses through the genres of mystery and the supernatural. The interspersing of elephant behavior information and Alice's journal entries about her subjects provide just the right amount of parallelism." - Library Journal "The pages turn apace, though Virgil labors under too many noir cliches, and wisecracking Serenity seems to be on loan from a Susan Isaacs novel. The ending borrows unforgivably from a source it would be equally unforgivable to reveal." - Kirkus

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Jodi Picoult Author Biography

Photo: Nina Subin

Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five novels, including Small Great Things , Leaving Time , The Storyteller , Lone Wolf , Sing You Home , House Rules , Handle with Care , Change of Heart , Nineteen Minutes , and My Sister's Keeper . She is also the author, with daughter Samantha van Leer, of two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page . Picoult lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children.

Author Interview Link to Jodi Picoult's Website

Name Pronunciation Jodi Picoult: pee-coh

Other books by Jodi Picoult at BookBrowse

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Eustea Reads

A life in books and tea, book review: leaving time by jodi picoult [major spoilers].

I’m sorry but I NEED to talk about the ending of this book, so please do not read this review if you intend to read this book and don’t want it spoiled!!

It’s been years since I read a Jodi Picoult book (might be a decade, actually) and my main impression of her is that she’s a writer who takes one topic (e.g.having a child so she can donate organs to her sister) and turn it into a story. I wasn’t very sure what this book was about (motherhood?) but based on the author’s note, the topic is elephants and I don’t think that’s the best topic for a story.

Leaving Time starts with Jenna, a teenager who’s been searching for her mum, Alice, ever since her mum disappeared after a death mysteriously occurred at the elephant sanctuary her parents ran. She finds a psychic, Serenity, and an ex-cop, Virgil who agree to help her.

Chapters in this book alternate between Jenna, Serenity, Virgil, and Alice (Alice provides the POV for what happened in the past, before the incident). Alice, naturally, provides the bulk of information about elephants. I think the elephants are supposed to stand in for humans and talk about the way we love and grieve but I felt like I was being force-fed elephant facts.

But okay, I can deal with elephant facts. What I can’t really deal with is the fact that the book used the same “twist” as The Sixth Sense. And the thing is, it didn’t feel like fair play. It turns out that a good proportion of the world can see ghosts so there were always people interacting with the three of them. I suppose it had to make happen because some of the ghosts are POV and weren’t aware that they died so they need to be able to interact with a few people, but it didn’t feel like something I could have guessed OR like something that I could, on a reread, notice. How am I supposed to know which minor character is a ghost/can see ghosts and which are normal people? I would have much preferred the book cut down the number of POV characters but I guess that wouldn’t have worked because Jenna is a ghost.

Overall, the basic premise of this story is fine and I might have considered the number of elephant facts cute but a bit too forced but I’m really not a fan of the ending.

Bonus novella review

My version of the book came with the novella: Larger than Life, which deals with Alice’s time in Africa before the events of Leaving Time. I have to say that I much preferred this – because of the setting, it makes sense that elephants are an integral part of the story. Plus, an elephant plays a key role in the plot so any fact about elephants is relevant. The story also explored the tensions that exist in a mother-daughter relationship, and while the human-to-elephant comparison also exists in Leaving Time, it makes a lot more sense here because the elephants are properly integrated into the plot.

Featured Image: Photo by Mylon Ollila on Unsplash

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2 thoughts on “ Book Review: Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult [Major Spoilers] ”

damn that is a wild plot twist at the end!

Yes, but also kind of a let down because the premise seemed really different haha

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Leaving Time, Jodi Picoult

Ten years later, precocious Jenna Metcalf never recovered from the loss of her mother. All she has left are memories and journals, but she yearns for answers and is determined to find them. Desperate for help, she secretly recruits Virgil Stanhope, the ex-cop who was assigned to the case a decade earlier. She also contacts Serenity Jones, a once famous but disgraced psychic, to help her put the pieces of her family together.

Like Jenna, Virgil Stanhope never recovered from the case either. Uncomfortable with how it was handled, he has spent the last decade on what-ifs and easing his guilt with alcohol. When Jenna appears seeking his help in locating her mother, he takes the opportunity to investigate the case again in hopes of making things right, all while battling his own self-destructive demons.

Serenity Jones, a well known, eccentric psychic, is reluctant to involve herself in Jenna’s quest for answers. However, Jenna is persistent and Serenity eventually agrees to help. As the story unfolds, we learn that this once highly acclaimed psychic has a devastating history of her own, and a reason for leaving the spotlight and isolating herself in a small New Hampshire town.

The three are an unlikely team with conflicting ideas on how to reach their common goal of finding out what happened to Alice Metcalf. As they dig deeper and get closer finding answers, they start to realize things are not as they seem. The case is far more twisting and complex than any of them ever could have imagined. Before long, they come to understand that the deeper they dig and the more they find, the less they want to know.

Superstar author Jodi Picoult has, once again, seamlessly woven characters and events into multiple themes that culminate to an explosive surprise ending. Picoult presents so many life issues for us to reflect upon: loss, maternal bond, animal cruelty, suicide, murder, marriage, infidelity, substance abuse, mental illness, death and the afterlife. The plot is delivered through the points of view of central characters and set in an animal sanctuary. Throughout the novel, Picoult intertwines information about elephant behavior, emotions and cognition. Not only does this information help to place the reader in the setting, feeling for these giant creatures and all that they have endured, but it also provides important symbolism. The symbolic connection between Jenna’s longing for maternal love and the bonding patterns of mother and baby elephants is clear. We see the void in Jenna’s life and her hunger for motherly affection, then we see how deeply elephant mothers and babies grieve when one of them is lost. These connections are smoothly tied in, add depth to the novel’s themes, and help the reader understand the raw emotions of the characters. Furthermore, the information Picoult provides about elephants, their struggles with exploitation, the cruelty of hunters, and the battles they face in the wild have made me fall in love with these beautiful, sensitive creatures. I will never look at an elephant in the same way again.

Also true to life are the complexities of these characters. As human beings, we all have histories. We all have trauma. We are all injured in some way, and indeed, shaped by our pasts. As each character develops, we see the hefty price they have paid for their mistakes, the impact of their subsequent guilt, the effects of maternal loss on emotional development, and the high cost of betrayal. As each character navigates their own twisting path and attempts to cope in their own, unique way, we are reminded that people are complicated, life is messy, and there are no easy answers.  

As with all of Jodi Picoult’s novels, Leaving Time is extremely well-written, appropriately paced and deeply thought provoking. This novel offers a wide range of characters and is centered around one of the most fascinating animals on the planet. Leaving Time is a gripping read that I highly recommend for teens, adults, and animal lovers. 

***Purchase this amazing novel at Amazon here . Please note that when you click and purchase the book through this affiliate link, I receive a tiny commission at no additional cost to you. My opinions remain my own.

See my review of Picoult’s  Handle with Care  here.

“No one in the world needs an elephant tusk but an elephant”  – Thomas Schmidt

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Jodi Picoult, Leaving TIme - "A suspension of more-than-average belief"

BY James Walton

1st Jan 2015 Book Reviews

Will Jodi Picoult's latest novel, Leaving Time , make the critics stand up and pay attention?

The Synopsis: Jenna Metcalf was with her mother the night she disappeared in tragic and mysterious circumstances, but she remembers nothing. Over ten years have passed, and still Jenna reads and rereads her mother's journals, hoping to find some clue hidden there, in the meticulous recording of her scientific research with elephants. Desperate for answers, Jenna uses all her savings to recruit the aid of a private detective - and a psychic.

The Review: Jodi Picoult is perhaps the classic example of an author whose books sell in their global millions but are either ignored or treated with unfailing sniffiness by the critics (expect, of course, Richard and Judy). With Leaving Time, both of these things seem likely to remain true.

Thirteen-year-old Jenna, who grew up on a New England elephant sanctuary with her parents, sets out to unravel the strange circumstances surrounding her father’s death with the aid of a local private eye and a woman who appears to be a genuine psychic. Along the way, there’s plenty of interesting information about elephant behaviour—but, rather than feeling tacked on, this is neatly combined with the unfolding central mystery, whose solution is jaw-droppingly unexpected but, in retrospect, also carefully prepared for. True, the result does require a suspension of more-than-average disbelief, but if you can manage that—and even if you can’t—Picoult goes about her work with such unashamed conviction that it’s impossible not to be swept along.

Read more articles by James Walton here

*This post contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.

• By Any Other Name
• Wish You Were Here
• The Book of Two Ways
• A Spark of Light
• Small Great Things
• Off the Page
• Leaving Time
• The Storyteller
• Between the Lines
• Sing You Home
• Over The Moon
• House Rules
• Handle With Care
• Change of Heart
• Wonder Woman
• Nineteen Minutes
• The Tenth Circle
• Vanishing Acts
• My Sister's Keeper
• Second Glance
• Perfect Match
• Salem Falls
• Plain Truth
• Keeping Faith
• Picture Perfect
• Harvesting the Heart
• Songs of the Humpback Whale

Jodi Picoult

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leaving time

Now on sale in PAPERBACK! in US and the UK.

The paperback edition includes the novella “Larger than Life,” a Q&A with Jodi, and discussion questions. Book club, anyone?

A mother's love. A daughter's search for truth. A mystery that will not rest…

Throughout her blockbuster career, #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult has seamlessly blended nuanced characters, riveting plots, and rich prose, brilliantly creating stories that “not only provoke the mind but touch the flawed souls in all of us” (The Boston Globe). Now, in her highly anticipated new novel, she’s delivered her most affecting work yet —a book unlike anything she’s written before.

LEAVING TIME debuted as #1 NYT bestseller!

Jodi’s new novel, Leaving Time, was released in the US, Canada, and Australia October 14, 2014, and in the UK on 4th November. 13-year-old Jenna Metcalf is on a quest, searching for her mother, Alice, an elephant researcher, who disappeared 10 years earlier after a tragic accident at their sanctuary for former circus/zoo elephants in New England. Leaving Time explores the mother-daughter relationship, be it elephant or human , and the idea that those we can't forget are never truly gone. …more

Best-selling, reliably entertaining, and thought-provoking Picoult's newest multifaceted novel is redolent with elephant lore that explores the animals' behavior when faced with death and grief, and combines a poignant tale of human loss with a perplexing crime story that delivers a powerhouse ending. Booklist

National Geographic Live! Jodi discusses Leaving Time with Don George, National Geographic Editor-at-large. She describes personal experiences that helped shape the story, including her own familial relationships and her trip to Botswana, where she learned about the urgent crisis facing elephants.

About Leaving Time

My mother would never have left me behind, not willingly. If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to prove it.

The publisher: Ballantine Books , publication date: October 14, 2014

Paperback publication date: April 28, 2015; The paperback edition includes the novella Larger Than Life .

For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe that she would be abandoned as a young child, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.

Desperate to find the truth, Jenna enlists two unlikely allies in her quest. The first is Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons—only to later doubt her gifts. The second is Virgil Stanhope, a jaded private detective who originally investigated Alice’s case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues. As the three work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they realize that in asking hard questions, they’ll have to face even harder answers.

As Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish. A deeply moving, gripping, and intelligent page-turner, Leaving Time is Jodi Picoult at the height of her powers.

The Elephant Sanctuary

Researching — with Professor Abigail Baird on the grounds of the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald Tennessee.

I had the pleasure of spending time there with the caregivers and their “girls”. Both African and Asian elephants spend their days in their own respective habitats, "just being elephants". 2700 acres of wooded hills, valleys, ponds, creeks and a lake are available to these elephants, retired from circuses and zoos. Heated state-of-the-art barns are always open for their choosing. Enjoy watching these Big Girls dusting, napping, swimming and socializing with their friends.

Tune in to the Elecam stream to see the Girls and their daily activities! The focus is on the Elephant Sanctuary and its on-demand cam footage.

A Note to Animal Lovers — from Jodi

I’d urge any animal lovers to consider visiting elephants.com — the website for the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. In addition to watching live elecams (be careful, you will lose hours of valuable work time . . . ) you can “adopt” an elephant , or make a donation in memory of an animal lover, or feed all the elephants for one day —no amount is too small, and all are so greatly appreciated. Please also visit the Global Sanctuary for Elephants ( globalelephants.org ), which is helping establish holistic, natural elephant sanctuaries world-wide.

For those who would like to learn more about poaching and/or elephants in the wild , or to contribute to those fighting to get international restrictions in place to prevent it from happening, please visit:

• elephantvoices.org
• savetheelephants.org
• globalelephants.org

The Billy and Kani Fund

The Billy and Kani Fund supports elephant recovery in Africa and Thailand, and fosters education about and conservation of elephants. Their mission is to restore space, peace and security for elephants and tribal communities.

Leaving Time questions, answers & interviews

Book club discussion questions.

• Despite their different backgrounds, Jenna, Serenity, and Virgil form a sort of unconventional family together. What do you think brings them together? Have you ever had a similar experience of finding support from an unlikely source?
• Alice says that 98 percent of science is quantifiable, leaving 2 percent “that can’t be measured or explained. And yet that does not mean it doesn’t exist.” (p. 392) Do you agree or disagree? Can you think of examples from the book or from your own experience of something that fits into that 2 percent?
• Virgil grapples with helping Jenna when he suspects discovering the truth might be more painful to her than never knowing. Have you ever been in a situation where you knew a truth that it might hurt someone to hear? What did you do?
• Serenity’s fake psychic readings are successful, she says, because people look for sense in the nonsensical. Do you agree or disagree? If a psychic reading brings someone comfort or helps them grieve, do you think it matters if the message is faked?
• Jenna meets up with another character at the very end of the book. (pp. 394–395) Were you surprised to see who that was? Why or why not?
• Alice describes some amazing examples of elephants appearing to exhibit grief and empathy, which are drawn from real–life research. Discuss some of the ways elephant grief is depicted. How is it the same as human mourning? How is it different?
• One of the major themes of Leaving Time is loss and how to cope with it. Discuss some of the ways the characters in this novel deal with their losses. Do you identify with any of these coping mechanisms more than others? How do you approach loss?
• Do you think Thomas’s erratic and upsetting behavior justifies Alice’s affair with Gideon? What would you have done in Alice’s place?
• Jenna compares her search for her mother to Captain Ahab’s search for the whale in Moby-Dick, or Javert hunting Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, saying they are all three defined by their search. Do you agree with this assessment? Have you ever felt defined in this way by something you wanted?
• Why do you think Serenity loses her gift? And why do you think Jenna is able to help bring it back?
• Do you believe in ghosts? If you could communicate with anyone who has passed away, who would it be?
• Discuss the significance of the title Leaving Time. What is the literal meaning that Jenna ascribes to the phrase as a baby? What are some other ways the title could be interpreted?
• “Negative moments get remembered. Traumatic ones get forgotten.” (p. 12) What do you think this means? Do you agree or disagree? Have you ever experienced something and discovered later that someone else remembers it completely differently?

Interview with Tusk

Tusk asked Jodi a few questions about her experiences with elephants while researching for Leaving Time.

How long did you spend doing research for Leaving Time and what did that entail?

For research, I was I was privileged to first spend time at The Elephant Sanctuary in TN, meeting their elephants and learning what the caregivers do and how the sanctuary operates. I also went to Botswana and spent a week with a researcher, tracking herds in the wild, much like Alice does in the book. I learned to track elephants by footprint, to tell them apart, and to observe their behavior and mannerisms. I also gathered stories about evidence of elephant cognition and the unbreakable bond of elephant relationships. For example, the researcher I worked with found a male juvenile whose trunk was caught in a snare. He wouldn't survive without the trunk, so a decision was made to have the Wildlife Management folks euthanize him. The researcher drove the Wildlife Management worker to the elephant in a vehicle, but the worker was inexperienced and shot the elephant in the forehead instead of behind the ear. This left the elephant in even more pain, trumpeting. At that moment, a huge matriarch charged down the hill at the vehicle. This young male had been ejected from the herd already -- he was in his teens - but his mother heard his distress and came running all the same. She stood over him, like a mother stands over a small calf for protection, until he died. Another example occurred in Pilanesberg, SA, a reserve existed for elephants that were orphaned after culls for population control. It was a social experiment – they thought these teen elephants would bond into a herd, but that didn’t happen, because there was no matriarch. So a decision was made to bring two older females, Durga and Owalla, back to Africa from the US where they had been working and training. It was a success – the two matriarch formed two thriving herds. However, Owalla got bitten by a hippo 16 years later and couldn’t be anesthetized for medical reasons. They knew she was going to die, if not treated. So Randall Moore – Owalla’s former trainer –was called in. He found the herd, got out of his vehicle, and called Owalla by name. The younger members of the herd scattered, terrified of this human contact. Owalla came forward and greeted Randall, and then lifted her trunk and her leg according to his commands, letting the vets treat her without any anesthetic. After sixteen years of being completely wild, she remembered him, and his commands.

What was the most interesting thing you learned from studying elephants?

Elephants are among the few species in this world (including humans) that show cross-species empathy – they will help out another animal in distress even if there is no biological advantage. Their grieving rituals are remarkable too – an elephant will have a change in behavior if it comes across the bones of another elephant – getting quiet and reverential, and the tail and ears droop. Elephants will return to the site of a herd member’s death for years afterward, to stand quietly for a while before moving on. They have been known to break into research facilities and take bones of an elephant that are being used by a researcher, and to bring them back to the site of that elephant’s death. At The Elephant Sanctuary, I met Sissy, an elephant who survived the 1981 Gainesville Flood by being submerged for 24 hours with only her trunk above water. When she got to the sanctuary, she was traumatized and took to carrying around a tire, like a child’s security blanket. Eventually she bonded with an elephant named Tina and they were fast friends. But Tina died, and when she did, Sissy stayed with her – and then remained by her grave for a few days. Finally, she placed her tire on the grave – like a wreath – and left it behind, never to return to it – almost as if she believed Tina needed the comfort more, now.

What did you learn about the plight of elephants?

Meeting these elephants in the wild and in sanctuaries really hammered home for me the damage done to elephants in captivity. The point of zoos was to develop breeding programs and more importantly to encourage conservation of animals that might not be indigenous to a country. However, the need for this has been reduced as the internet has developed. Any school kid, for example, can learn about elephants in Africa with a click. The zoo habitat is never large enough to accommodate an elephant. Moreover, elephants live in herds, so creating a "fake herd" of two of three elephants is much like throwing a human into a cell with a stranger and assuming they will be fast friends. 75% of elephants in North American zoos are overweight, 40% have foot or joint problems, and 80% have behavioral tics like head bobbing or swaying due to stress. For every elephant born in a zoo, another two die -- so even saying that zoos foster breeding programs is not quite accurate. Ideally, elephants should not be in zoos. Sanctuaries allow an elephant to live out the rest of its life in a habitat that is hundreds of acres, and to not be on display -- in sanctuaries, elephants set their time for coming and going. Of course, elephants in the wild are not thriving either. In Africa, 38,000 elephants are killed each year by poachers. Right now the estimate is that in ten years there will be no more African elephants. The price of an ounce of ivory has skyrocketed from $150 to $1300, due to demand from the far east (Southeast Asia and China). And lest you think poaching doesn't matter here in the US, every month 1-3 tons of ivory is poached by members of Al Shabaab, a terrorist group in Somalia with clear links to Al Quaeda. In order to save elephants, we need to continue to spread the word about poaching, as Tusk and the Clinton Global Initiative have done. The UN has created a resolution saying that poaching fuels instability in countries, and President Obama banned ivory trade in the US. This is all a good start. But in addition, the countries where poaching is the worst needs to offer their farmers an economic alternative to the one being offered by poachers. Local governments need to see that the cost of losing tourism will far exceed the immediate cash flow of poaching elephants, and need to create punishments for poachers that reflect this. At the same time, those who demand ivory need to be educated about the reality of poaching -- many believe that an elephant can regrow a tusk, which is not true; the only way to get an elephant tusk is to kill the elephant.

What do you think your readers can do that will help save elephants?

Why did you choose elephants what about them inspired you most.

I have three kids, and my daughter – my youngest – was getting ready to go to college, which meant I’d be an empty nester. It was daunting, to say the least. Then I read that in the wild, an elephant mother and daughter stay together until one of them die. I thought, How enlightened! Why can’t we be like that!? I began to do a little digging on elephants, and when I discovered that they actually grieve and experience and process loss, I was completely hooked, and knew I would be writing about what it meant to be left behind…and also that I had my profession for the character of Alice.

Praise for Leaving Time

Since becoming a fixture on bestseller lists eight years ago, every novel Jodi Picoult puts out has been touted as her “best one yet.” But this one might actually be her best one yet. It’s got everything you’d expect from Picoult: the impeccable pacing, the efficient prose, the expertly rendered characters, the brushstrokes of deep emotional brilliance, the carefully presented moral dilemmas. But somehow, Picoult has managed to do what she does so well with human characters – present them as a hodgepodge of flaws, quirks and strengths that give the reader no choice but to believe in their existence – with elephants, too. …As the narrative moves towards its unexpected and shockingly beautiful conclusion, Picoult presents a chronicle of the inner lives of a group of elephants and their ancestors that makes this book part breathless mystery, part exquisite love letter to a species that shares a surprising amount in common with humans, especially in the way they socialize, care for their young, and grieve their losses. Truly, this is Picoult at the top of her game. The Globe and Mail - Toronto

Readers can usually count on blockbuster novelist Jodi Picoult for two things. First is a smart, accessible yarn with a suspenseful puzzle at its core that will keep readers enthusiastically turning the page. Second is impressive insight into any number of topical issues. From donor children and terminal illness to teen suicide and social issues like class and race, Picoult does her homework, and her main themes are thoroughly researched and engrossingly presented. With this new novel, “Leaving Time,” her fans will not be disappointed. Boston Globe

...the writing and storytelling compelled the suspension of disbelief and acceptance of the unimaginable. And in the end an amazed and admiring gasp—‘I did not see that coming.’ NY Journal of Books

LEAVING TIME may be [Picoult’s] finest work yet and is sure to produce much discussion after reading it. Bookreporter.com

A truly engaging read. Perfect for Picoult fans and book clubs. Library Journal (starred review)

With plenty of twists and a surprising ending, [Leaving Time] explores the grieving process and what happens when we cannot move on. Woman’s Day

Best-selling, reliably entertaining, and thought provoking Picoult’s newest multifaceted novel is redolent with elephant lore that explores the animals’ behavior when faced with death and grief, and combines a poignant tale of human loss with a perplexing crime story that delivers a powerhouse ending. Booklist

Picoult’s novel explores grief, memory, and motherhood through the unlikely lens of elephant behavior... The pachyderms are as complex as the humans, making the journey memorable and poignant. Publishers Weekly

Critical acclaim for Jodi

Picoult writes with unassuming brilliance. Stephen King

It’s hard to exaggerate how well Picoult writes. Financial Times

Picoult is a master of the craft of storytelling. Associated Press

…her storytelling skills are most evident. Publishers Weekly

I LOVE to meet my fans!   xoxo —Jodi

A huge THANK YOU to all of my fans who come out to my Leaving Time tour!

If you weren't able to see Jodi on tour, you can watch her discuss Leaving Time on CBS This Morning!

leaving time South Africa book tour

A huge thank you to all of my south african fans who come out to my leaving time this january.

leaving time UK book tour

Watch Jodi's live stream Q + A from the UK on Children's Authors Live — recorded November 5, 2014

A huge THANK YOU to all of my UK fans who come out to my Leaving Time tour in November!

leaving time Canada book tour

A huge THANK YOU to all of my Canadian fans who come out to my Leaving Time tour last fall!

leaving time US book tour

A huge THANK YOU to all of my US fans who come out to my Leaving Time tour last fall!

A Conversation with Jodi about Leaving Time

I started to write Leaving Time when I was in the process of becoming an empty-nester. My daughter Sammy was headed off to school. I was thinking a lot of how we humans raise our kids to be self sufficient enough to leave us – and how depressing it was for those who were left behind. That theme – of what happens to the people who are left behind – became what I wanted to write about. Then, I was reading something and learned that in the wild, an elephant mother and daughter stay together their whole lives until one of them dies. Given my frame of mind, it seemed so much more pleasant to do things the way elephants do. I began to dig a bit more about elephants, and their reaction to death, and what I uncovered became a metaphor for the novel.

For the character of Alice, who studies elephant cognition, I went first to a professor at Vassar – Abigail Baird – who taught me all about the brain and how memory works. Then, we ventured to Botswana to work with Jeanetta Selier, a Ph.D. researcher who studies herds in the Tuli block. You probably know a lot about elephants already – like the fact that they are the largest land mammals, 7-10K pounds. They’re herbivores. They are recognizable by tusks, hair, voice, and ears – elephant ears are as individual as human fingerprints. They live for 50-70 years in the wild, and adult females live in herds made of a matriarch – the oldest and biggest elephant – and two to ten females. Babies are allomothered, which means that they are cared for by all females in the herd, and older siblings get to practice their parenting skills before actually becoming moms. Male elephants are chased from the herd at about age 13 by the matriarch, when they first come into musth , a state where they get very aggressive and want to mate. They roam with small groups of males.

What you may NOT know about elephants is that they have an incredibly complex brain, capable of communicating, learning, remembering, and experiencing fear, pain and loss. In Kenya, there are two tribes that interact with the elephants frequently. The Masaai use spears to hunt them, and wear red. The Kamba are farmers who don’t hunt elephant. Scientists have proven that elephants can distinguish between the two groups by smell and sight. Herds showed greater fear when showed red garments – which suggests cognitive capacity and long term memory. Even elephants who had no direct experience with Masaai reacted this way, suggesting social learning and communication.

Joyce Poole, a famous elephant researcher, has done studies of empathy in elephants. She recounts how one elephant flinched when another reached toward an electric fence, even though the fence was inactive. There have been multiple reports of elephants helping to free rhino babies caught in a mud hole, although there is no evolutionary advantage to that behavior. They refuse to leave sick or injured elephants behind, even if the sick animal is not related to them.

The memory of an elephant? Turns out it’s a real thing. At the Elephant Sanctuary in TN, elephants reacted so badly to helicopters and planes that they had to institute a no fly zone overhead. The only helicopters most of these elephants would have ever encountered was 40-50 years prior, during the culls when they were captured and brought to the US.

The relationships of elephants last a lifetime. At The Elephant Sanctuary in TN, an elephant named Jenny was living peacefully when a new elephant, Shirley, arrived. When Shirley came into the barn that night, in the stall beside Jenny’s, Jenny began to pound at the bars between them, trying to get to Shirley. The caregivers eventually opened the gate between them and immediately Shirley and Jenny began to move in tandem – staying inseparable. When Jenny lay down to sleep, Shirley would straddle her, like a mother elephant would a calf. It turned out that when Jenny was a calf and Shirley was 30, they had both been at the same circus for a brief while. They had been separated for 22 years, but recognized each other. In Pilanesberg in S. Africa, there was a reserve for elephants who had been orphaned after culls for population control. But putting together a bunch of teen elephants didn’t work, and two matriarchs were brought over from the US, where they had been trained and living. Sixteen years passed, and these two matriarchs managed to whip the teen elephants into herd formation, going without human contact for 16 years. Then, one of the elephants, Owalla, was bitten by a hippo. For medical reasons she couldn’t be sedated and researchers knew she would die if not treated. Worse, if she died, the fragile herd would likely fall apart again. Desperate, they reached out to Randall Moore – the original trainer of Owalla, who had not seen her for over a decade. He flew to Pilanesberg, got out of his vehicle, and called Owalla’s name. While her herd ran away, terrified, Owalla greeted Randall, following his commands to lift her trunk and stay still so she could be treated by a vet without anesthetic.

Elephants have elaborate rituals of grief, much like humans. If an elephant comes across the bones of another elephant, it will be quiet and reverential. The tail and ears will droop. They will pick up the bones and roll them beneath their hind feet. They only do this with elephant bones, not the bones of other animals. They will return to the spot of a herd member’s passing and pay respects for years to come. They will often cover an elephant who dies with branches and dirt. They’ve been known to break into research camps to steal a bone a scientist is working with, and to return it to the spot of that elephant’s demise. But the most lovely story of grief I learned came from the Elephant Sanctuary. An elephant named Sissy survived the 1981 Gainesville flood and was brought, traumatized, to the Sanctuary. She took to carrying a tire around, like a pacifier. After a while, she befriended another elephant there named Tina. When Tina died, Sissy stayed at her grave for a day. Then, she lay her tire down on her best friend’s grave, like a wreath, and left – almost as if she knew that Tina was the one who needed comfort, now.

If you learn this much about elephants, you can’t NOT be moved by their plight in both captivity and the wild. The point of zoos was to develop breeding programs and more importantly to encourage conservation of animals that might not be indigenous to a country.  However, the need for this has been reduced as the internet has developed.  Any school kid, for example, can learn about elephants in Africa with a click.  Elephants suffer greatly in captivity.  The zoo habitat is never large enough to accommodate an elephant.  Moreover, elephants live in herds, so creating a "fake herd" of two of three elephants is much like throwing a human into a cell with a stranger and assuming they will be fast friends.  75% of elephants in North American zoos are overweight, 40% have foot or joint problems, and 80% have behavioral tics like head bobbing or swaying due to stress.  For every elephant born in a zoo, another two die -- so even saying that zoos foster breeding programs is not quite accurate.  Ideally, elephants should not be in zoos.  Sanctuaries allow an elephant to live out the rest of its life in a habitat that is hundreds of acres, and to not be on display -- in sanctuaries, elephants set their time for coming and going.

Of course, elephants in the wild are not thriving either.  In Africa, 38K elephants are killed each year by poachers.  The first hint that a population is being poached is a disparity between females and males – because poachers go for the biggest tusks. Once all the males are gone, the poachers go after the matriarchs – but the collateral damage of losing a matriarch is huge. If a matriarch dies, so does the collective knowledge of that family, and the society disintegrates. The herd won’t know where the best water holes are, in times of drought. They won’t know the safest travel corridors. Any nursing babies die if their mothers are killed. Right now the estimate is that in ten years there will be no more African elephants.

But poaching isn’t just a wildlife crisis – it’s a humanitarian concern. The price of an ounce of ivory has skyrocketed from $150 to $1300, due to demand from the Far East (Southeast Asia and China). Money from poaching fuels instability in Democratic African Republic, and there are rumors that Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army was funded with the proceeds of illegal ivory from the Democratic Republic of Congo. And lest you think poaching doesn't matter here in the US, every month 1-3 tons of ivory is poached by members of Al Shabaab, a terrorist group in Somalia with clear links to Al Quaeda.

So how do we save these magnificent, intelligent animals? We need to continue to spread the word about poaching, as Tusk and the Clinton Global Initiative have done.  The UN has created a resolution saying that poaching fuels instability in countries, and President Obama banned ivory trade in the US.  China even destroyed stores of illegal ivory, crushing it, which set a great example. This is all a good start.  But in addition, the countries where poaching is the worst needs to offer their farmers an economic alternative to the one being offered by poachers.  Local governments need to see that the cost of losing tourism will far exceed the immediate cash flow of poaching elephants, and need to create punishments for poachers that reflect this.  At the same time, those who demand ivory need to be educated about the reality of poaching -- many believe that an elephant can regrow a tusk, which is not true; the only way to get an elephant tusk is to kill the elephant.  Here in the US, if you are concerned about elephants, donate time and money to an accredited anti-poaching organization.  And write your congressional representatives and tell them to support the presidential initiative against poaching.  Because I promise you – once you read LEAVING TIME, you’re never going to think about elephants quite the same way.

Listen to an excerpt

An excerpt from leaving time.

Some people used to believe that there was an elephant graveyard—a place that sick and old elephants would travel to die. They’d slip away from their herds and would lumber across the dusty landscape, like the titans we read about in seventh grade in Greek Mythology. Legend said the spot was in Saudi Arabia; that it was the source of a supernatural force; that it contained a book of spells to bring about world peace.

Explorers who went in search of the graveyard would follow dying elephants for weeks, only to realize they’d been led in circles. Some of these voyagers disappeared completely. Some could not remember what they had seen, and not a single explorer who claimed to find the graveyard could ever locate it again.

Here’s why: The elephant graveyard is a myth.

True, researchers have found groups of elephants that died in the same vicinity, many over a short period of time. My mother, Alice, would have said there’s a perfectly logical reason for a mass burial site: a group of elephants who died all at once due to lack of food or water; a slaughter by ivory hunters. It’s even possible that the strong winds in Africa could blow a scattering of bones into a concentrated pile. Jenna, she would have told me, there’s an explanation for everything you see.

There is plenty of information about elephants and death that are not fables, but instead cold, hard science. My mother would have been able to tell me that, too. We would have sat, shoulder to shoulder, beneath the massive oak where Maura liked to shade herself, watching the elephant pick up acorns with her trunk and pitch them. My mother would rate each toss like an Olympic judge. 8.5 . . . 7.9. Ooh! A perfect 10.

Maybe I would have listened. But maybe, too, I would have just closed my eyes. Maybe I would have tried to memorize the smell of bug spray on my mother’s skin, or the way she absent-mindedly braided my hair, tying it off on the end with a stalk of green grass.

Maybe the whole time I would have been wishing there really was an elephant graveyard, except not just for elephants. Because then I’d be able to find her.

When I was nine—before I grew up and became a scientist—I thought I knew everything, or at least I wanted to know everything, and in my mind there was no difference between the two. At that age, I was obsessed with animals. I knew that a group of tigers was called a “streak.” I knew that dolphins were carnivores. I knew that giraffes had four stomachs and that the leg muscles of a locust were 1000 times more powerful than the same weight of human muscle. I knew that white polar bears had black skin beneath their fur, and that jellyfish have no brains. I knew all these facts from the Time-Life monthly animal fact cards that I had received as a birthday gift from my father, who had moved out a year ago and now lived in San Francisco with his best friend Frank, who my mother called “the other woman” when she thought I wasn’t listening.

Every month new cards arrived in the mail, and then one day, in October of 1977, the best card of all arrived: the one about elephants. I cannot tell you why they were my favorite animal. Maybe it was my bedroom, with its green shag jungle carpet and the wallpaper border of cartoon pachyderms dancing across the walls. Maybe it was the fact that the first movie I’d ever seen, as a toddler, was Dumbo. Maybe it was because the silk lining inside my mother’s fur coat, the one she had inherited from her own mother, was made from an Indian sari and printed with elephants.

From that Time-Life card, I learned the basics about elephants. They were the largest land animals on the planet, sometimes weighing more than six tons. They ate 300-400 pounds of food each day. They had the longest pregnancy of any land mammal—22 months. They lived in breeding herds, led by a female matriarch, often the oldest member of the group. She was the one who decided where the group went every day, when they took a rest, where they ate and where they drank. Babies were raised and protected by all the female relatives in the herd, and traveled with them, but when males were about thirteen years old, they left—sometimes preferring to wander on their own, and sometimes gathering with other males in a bull group.

But those were facts that everyone knew. I, on the other hand, became obsessed and dug a little deeper, trying to find out everything I could at the school library and from my teachers and books. So I also could tell you that elephants got sunburned, which is why they would toss dirt on their backs and roll in the mud. Their closest living relative was the rock hyrax, a tiny furry thing that looked like a guinea pig. I knew that just like a human baby sucks its thumb to calm itself down, an elephant calf might sometimes suck its trunk. I knew that in 1916, in Erwin, Tennessee, an elephant named Mary was tried and hanged for murder.

In retrospect I am sure my mother got tired of hearing about elephants. Maybe that is why, one Saturday morning, she woke me before the sun came up and told me we were going on an adventure. There were no zoos near where we lived in Connecticut, but the Forest Park Zoo in Springfield, Massachusetts had a real, live elephant—and we were going to see her.

To say I was excited was an understatement. I peppered my mother with elephant jokes for hours:

What’s beautiful, gray, and wears glass slippers? Cinderelephant.

Why are elephants wrinkled? They don’t fit on the ironing board.

How do you get down from an elephant? You don’t. You get down from a goose.

Why do elephants have trunks? Because they’d look funny with glove compartments.

When we got to the zoo, I raced along the paths until I found myself standing in front of Morganetta the elephant.

Who looked nothing like what I had imagined.

This was not the majestic animal featured on my Time-Life card, or in the books I had studied. For one thing, she was chained to a giant cement block in the center, so that she couldn’t walk very far in any direction. There were sores on her hind legs from the shackles. She was missing an eye, and with her other, she wouldn’t look at me. I was just another person who had come to stare at her, in her prison.

My mother was stunned by her condition, too. She flagged down a zookeeper, who said that Morganetta had once been in local parades, and had done stunts like competing against undergrads in a tug-o’-war at a nearby school, but that she had gotten unpredictable and violent in her old age. She’d lashed out at visitors with her trunk if they came too close to her cage. She had broken a caretaker’s wrist.

I started to cry.

My mother bundled me back to the car for the four hour drive home, although we had only been at the zoo for ten minutes.

“Can’t we help her?” I asked.

This is how, at age nine, I became an elephant advocate. After a trip to the library, I sat down at my kitchen table, and I wrote to the mayor of Springfield, MA, asking him to give Morganetta more space, and more freedom.

He didn’t just write me back. He sent his response in the Boston Globe , who published it, and then a reporter called to do a story on the nine-year-old who had convinced the mayor to move Morganetta into the much larger buffalo enclosure at the zoo. I was given a special Concerned Citizen award at my elementary school assembly. I was invited back for the grand opening to cut the red ribbon with the mayor. Flash bulbs went off in my face, blinding me, as Morganetta roamed behind us. This time, she looked at me with her good eye. And I knew, I just knew, she was still miserable. The things that had happened to her—the chains and the shackles, the cage and the beatings, maybe even the memory of the moment she was taken out of a forest somewhere in Africa—all that was still with her in that buffalo enclosure, and it took up all the extra space.

For the record, Mayor Dimauro did continue to try to make life better for Morganetta. In 1979, after the demise of Forest Park’s resident polar bear, the facility closed and Morganetta was moved to the Los Angeles Zoo. Her home there was much bigger. It had a pool, and toys, and two older elephants.

If I knew back then what I know now, I could have told the mayor that just because you stick an elephant in proximity with others does not mean they will form friendships. They are as unique in their personalities as humans are, and just as you would not assume that two random humans would become close friends, you should not assume that two elephants will bond simply because they are both elephants. Morganetta continued to spiral deeper into depression, losing weight and deteriorating. Approximately one year after she arrived in LA, she was found dead in the bottom of the enclosure’s pool.

The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve.

The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it . . . some stories just don’t have a happy ending.

‘Leaving Time’ by Jodi Picoult

Readers can usually count on blockbuster novelist Jodi Picoult for two things. First is a smart, accessible yarn with a suspenseful puzzle at its core that will keep readers enthusiastically turning the page. Second is impressive insight into any number of topical issues. From donor children and terminal illness to teen suicide and social issues like class and race, Picoult does her homework, and her main themes are thoroughly researched and engrossingly presented. With this new novel, “Leaving Time,” her fans will not be disappointed.

At the heart of the book is the extraordinary behavior of elephants. Research scientist Alice Metcalf has devoted her professional life to investigating how elephants experience grief. But after a tragedy occurs at the New Hampshire elephant sanctuary run by the scientist and her husband, Thomas, Alice disappears, and that’s the novel’s central mystery.

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The real protagonist of “Leaving Time” is Alice and Thomas’s 13-year-old daughter, Jenna, who at the novel’s beginning sets out to uncover what happened to her mother. Jenna cannot accept that someone who spent her career researching the behavior of grief, especially the special bond between mother and offspring, could possibly abandon her own three-year-old child with no logical explanation. Ten years later, Jenna is on a mission. Her father, currently residing in a psychiatric facility, mired by a tenuous grip on reality, is no help. “All I have left of my mother is her research,’’ Jenna says. “I pore over her journals, because I know one day the words will rearrange themselves on a page and point me toward her.”

Chapters of “Leaving Time” bounce back and forth in time and are recounted through alternating voices — Jenna, Alice, and two characters who find in Jenna’s quest a chance to redeem themselves. The flamboyant, pink-haired Serenity was once a TV celebrity psychic who found herself making very public blunders after losing her mojo. When she meets Jenna, Serenity is making a modest living telling people what they want to hear. “The only supernatural power at work here is the ability of the average person to find meaning in random details. We are a race that sees the Virgin Mary in the cut stump of a tree, that can find God in the twist of a rainbow, that hears Paulisdead when a Beatles’ song is played backwards. The same intricate human mind that makes sense of the nonsensical is the human mind that can believe a fake psychic.” With Serenity, Picoult sets up questions of afterlife.

Then there’s Virgil, the ex-cop who initially investigated, but never solved, Alice’s disappearance and lost himself in a bottle. Jenna and her cohorts make an off-beat, slightly contrived but engaging threesome as they dig into the complexities of Alice’s past.

Alice’s slowly unfurling back story includes stirring, often heartbreaking facts and anecdotes about elephants (all based on real elephants at The Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn.). Animal lovers will be hard-pressed not to be moved and amazed by revelations of the creatures’ vast cognitive and emotional intelligence.

Picoult’s stories reinforce the significance of the bond between mother and child. Throughout, she draws parallels between elephant and human behavior, bolstering the claim that in addition to remarkable memory, these giant creatures have a stunning capacity for communal connection and support, as well as emotion, from anger and grief to love, loyalty, and forgiveness.

“Leaving Time” is a little uneven. Jenna seems too wise and street savvy to be totally believable. And one pivotal scene midway and the novel’s shocker of an ending require considerable suspension of disbelief. But that doesn’t stop it from both piercing and uplifting the hearts of those willing go along for the ride.

Karen Campbell can be reached at [email protected] .

Leaving Time

53 pages • 1 hour read

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Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 4

Part 1, Chapters 5-8

Part 1, Chapters 9-11

Part 1, Chapters 12-17

Part 2, Chapters 18-21

Part 2, Chapters 22-26

Part 2, Chapters 27-32

Part 2, Chapters 33-43

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Summary and Study Guide

Leaving Time , the 2014 novel by Jodi Picoult, is the story of a young girl’s search for her missing mother. When Jenna Metcalf was 3 years old, her mother, Alice, went missing under mysterious circumstances. Jenna’s parents run an elephant sanctuary in New Hampshire.

One night, an employee’s body is found trampled by an elephant. Jenna’s mother is taken to the hospital with a head injury, possibly caused by the same elephant, but checks herself out and disappears that night. She’s never seen again. Jenna remains convinced her mother isn’t dead.

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With the help of a washed-up detective named Virgil and a psychic named Serenity, who’s lost her connection to the beyond, Jenna sets out to find Alice.

The trio stumbles across clues that direct them to the other people involved in the tragedy . They find a pebble necklace at the scene of the accident, which they then take to Jenna’s father, hoping it will jog his memory. Thomas Metcalf suffers from manic depression and is confined to a mental institution. When he sees Jenna wearing the necklace, he reacts violently.

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Virgil suspects that Thomas lashed out because his wife, Alice, may have been having an affair with a sanctuary worker named Gideon. Jenna tracks Gideon to another elephant preserve in Tennessee, where he confesses to the affair. The romance is complicated by the fact that Gideon’s wife, Grace, and his mother-in-law, Nevvie, also work at the sanctuary. When Grace finds out about the affair, she commits suicide.

To make matters worse, Alice is expecting Gideon’s baby. They plan to run away together with Jenna. When Gideon tells his mother-in-law that he is going to leave with Alice, she says she hopes he gets everything he deserves.

Jenna now believes her mother may be dead and asks Serenity to try to contact her. They go back to the spot in the elephant sanctuary that held special meaning for Alice. Serenity fakes a vision, believing this will give Jenna some closure. Nothing happens, but Serenity comes across a tooth lodged in the dirt. This is a fresh piece of evidence.

When Virgil, Serenity, and Jenna take the tooth for DNA analysis, the trio learns that it belonged to a child under the age of 5. In that moment, Jenna remembers exactly what happened on the night of the accident.

Nevvie leads Jenna out into the sanctuary grounds and kills her by smashing her head with a rock. Seeking revenge for the loss of her own daughter, Nevvie deprives Alice of hers. Alice arrives too late. Seeing what’s happened, she attacks Nevvie. They struggle, and Alice receives a blow to the head, blacking out. When she revives, Nevvie is dead, and Jenna’s body is missing.

Fearing that she’ll be accused of murder, Alice flees back to Africa. One of the sanctuary elephants drags Jenna’s body away and covers it with dirt. Jenna realizes that she is actually dead. Knowing that she’s a ghost, Jenna can let go and move on to the spirit dimension. Virgil also realizes that he’s a ghost. He always believed that he botched his suicide attempt after failing to solve Alice’s disappearance. In reality, he succeeded in killing himself and has been trapped ever since. Now that the case is solved, he can also move on to the spirit realm.

Serenity learns that she hasn’t lost her psychic gift. She’s been speaking to ghosts all along but thought they were real. She contacts the police, shows them the tooth, and leads them to the place where it was found. Jenna’s remains are discovered nearby.

Alice gets a call in Africa notifying her that Jenna’s body has been found. She returns to the US for her daughter’s burial. Serenity contacts her, claiming to have spoken to Jenna. At first, Alice doesn’t believe the psychic, but Serenity knows all sorts of facts about Jenna that are impossible to explain. Jenna’s spirit manifests in a mirror, in order to reassure Alice that she isn’t to blame for Jenna’s death. This gives Alice closure, and she, too, can now let go and move on.

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The author, most recently, of “Leaving Time” hates Russian lit. “You need genealogy charts to just figure out the characters, every novel is a thousand pages and pretty much everyone dies.”

What books are currently on your night stand?

“We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,” by Karen Joy Fowler; “One Plus One,” by Jojo Moyes; “The Rosie Project,” by Graeme Simsion. Also stacked are the books I have recently read and loved: Luanne Rice’s “The Lemon Orchard”; Chris Bohjalian’s “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands”; John Searles’s “Help for the Haunted”; Jo-Ann Mapson’s “Owen’s Daughter.” In related news, I can no longer find my alarm clock when the buzzer goes off.

Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today?

I remember discovering Hemingway when I was in college. I had been assigned some of the Nick Adams stories for the Princeton syllabus, and I must admit: I didn’t understand the wow factor at first. It wasn’t until I read the short story “Hills Like White Elephants” that I was appropriately blown away. Here’s a piece about abortion that never actually mentions the phrase, and in fact the omission (and its reason for never being uttered) is the most critical element in the story. It’s one thing to craft a reputation as a novelist for the words one uses — it’s a whole new playing level to be revered for what you don’t say, but manage to convey anyway. My favorite contemporary novelist is Alice Hoffman. Her work lies in the dreamy world where love collides with magical realism, reminding me of Gabriel García Márquez. With every book, she has startling, beautiful turns of phrase that take my breath away.

What’s your favorite movie based on a book?

As someone who’s written a book that was badly translated to film, I am very sensitive to this topic, and always on the lookout for movies that are faithful adaptations of stories I’ve loved. I still don’t really understand why Hollywood continues to fix things that are not broken. My gold standard for book-to-film translation is “Out of Africa.” In that memoir, Isak Dinesen — whose Gothic fairy tales are lush and elaborately written — dramatically alters her style to describe her life. The more personal the story she tells, the more she strips down the language — and the barest bones are used to tell of her relationship with Denys Finch Hatton. We now know, from other memoirs and original source material, that the writer’s relationship with Finch Hatton was one of the seminal moments of her life; it’s almost as if her deliberate parity of description was meant to keep the private private; to suggest that ordinary words simply could not convey the depth and parameters of this relationship, thus the writer was not even going to make the attempt to do so. The filmmakers took all the ellipses in Dinesen’s memoir and filled them in visually, revealing Dinesen’s complex relationship with Finch Hatton through images the way she could not in prose.

And which book do you think should be made into a movie?

I’ve recently finished Deborah Harkness’s “Book of Life.” The whole series is like Harry Potter for adults — it’s very visually rich, and I would love to see a filmmaker do it justice. Imagine a witch who sees spells all around her in various threads of color. Cool, right?

What’s the best love story you’ve ever read?

“Romeo and Juliet.” For years, I waited to meet a guy whose pickup lines, with my responses, would automatically turn into a sonnet. Sadly, I think that kind of guy went out of fashion with doublets and hose. What’s wonderful about Romeo and Juliet, of course, is that as long as there are adolescents who believe that they are the first to invent true love, and as long as there are parents to stand in their way, the story is relevant. And when you think of how this plot has been adapted and resurrected — from “West Side Story” on Broadway to “Warm Bodies,” the recent film about a star-crossed romance between a zombie and a live girl — you realize how mutable and timeless the nugget of Shakespeare’s story is.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Your favorite book? Most beloved character?

One of my first memories is of getting a library card. My mom was a huge reader, and every week she’d come home with a stack of books, and all I wanted was to be like her. I started reading at age 3, and I was so excited when, for my birthday, I got a reading lamp that sat next to my bed, so that I could read before I went to sleep at night. I was a voracious reader, and I remember several children’s books that were special: “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Umbrella,” “Little Blue and Little Yellow.” As I got older, I started inhaling the All-of-a-Kind Family chapter books, and the “Little House on the Prairie” series. I remember wanting to be as kind and calm and beautiful as Mary, but realizing deep down that I was probably a lot more like Laura: headstrong, messy, and too smart for my own good.

If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

When I was 13, I read “Gone With the Wind.” I memorized entire passages and could act out scenes between Rhett and Scarlett, playing both roles — which also explains why I didn’t have a boyfriend until I was 15. It was the first book that made me realize an author could create an entire world out of words, and it was the first time I thought, “Maybe I could do that.” I’ve revisited the book numerous times, and I’m always intrigued by how manipulative and shrewd and needy Scarlett is — but how she’s also impossibly strong.

And of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite, and why?

My favorite is “Second Glance.” It’s about the things that come back to haunt us: ghosts, and history. It illuminates a period in the 1920s-30s that very few people know about: when various states were in the business of racial hygiene, getting rid of people who were considered ​an economic and social drain on the community.

The other reason I love “Second Glance” is because the research was the most remarkable I’ve ever done — I went ghost hunting with the Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS). They explained to me that dying is like getting on a bus: You’re supposed to go to the end of the line and get off. But sometimes the bus stops at a rest stop and you get off to use the restroom — and when you come back, the bus is gone. That’s a ghost. They then took me to a home in Massachusetts ​whose owners had contacted them after hearing moans and groans in the attic. I was given the key to the padlocked attic door, and the ghost hunters set up a video camera on a tripod to record paranormal energy. I was the last one out of the attic; I closed and locked the door. The couple had two kids, ages 6 months and 22 months, asleep in their separate rooms. Downstairs, the homeowners described coming home to find all the faucets running, all the cereal spilled into a pile on the kitchen floor. One night at 2 a.m. they heard calliope music and found a child’s toy piano playing — without batteries — on the steps of the attic. I went to check on the kids, and on the floor outlining the edge of each crib, I found six pennies per room that had not been present 10 minutes earlier, all dated between 1968 and 1973. I unlocked the attic door, went to the video camera tripod and found another 15 pennies underneath (all dated between 1968 and 1973) that had not been there when I left. Was I scared? No. Did it make sense? No, and I’d seen it with my own eyes. Also, pennies with those dates were ​scarce. Eventually the ghost hunters went back and determined that there was something paranormal in the house, and did research — two people died there. One in 1968, and one in 1973. I’ve done a ton of research for my writing, but that remains the coolest.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

I would be honored if the president read “Nineteen Minutes,” the book I wrote about a school shooting. (O.K. In truth, I wouldn’t just be honored. I’d probably faint.) It addresses what happens when bullying is ignored by schools, and what it means to be a kid who feels marginalized, and why the media is fostering future school shootings by focusing their 24/7 coverage not on the victims, but on the shooter. (This is obviously done for ratings, but may in fact be what makes another kid on the fringe think: “Hmm. No one notices me, but maybe this is how to get my 15 minutes of fame.”) Most importantly, the book illustrates the staggering emotional cost of a school shooting — something that is routinely left out of pro-Second Amendment arguments against gun control. Come to think of it, maybe the president isn’t the one who needs to read this book. Maybe I could require the head of the N.R.A. to read it instead?

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?

Alice Hoffman, because I idolize her writing and because she’s just the loveliest, kindest lady. Toni Morrison, because she’s Toni Morrison. The only regret I have from my education at Princeton was that after hearing her read from “Beloved” while it was a work in progress (seriously, you could have heard a pin drop in the room as she commanded it with her voice and her prose), she went on to teach there — after I graduated. And Mary Morris, who was my mentor and is an impossibly gifted writer of fiction and memoir, and who really did teach me everything I know. I would bake a very delicious chocolate dessert to thank each of them for the gifts they’ve given me: Alice Hoffman made me a hungry reader again, after I was burned out from being an English major; Toni Morrison showed me a pinnacle to which I aspire as a writer; and Mary Morris gave me the tools of my craft.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

The one genre I absolutely cannot stand is Russian literature. You need genealogy charts to just figure out the characters, every novel is a thousand pages and pretty much everyone dies. One year my son went on a Russian lit kick and tried to get me to read some Tolstoy, but I just couldn’t. Life’s too short. Which, come to think of it, is coincidentally the theme of most Russian literature, too!

What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?

One that explores why our country is so contentiously divided along the fault line of religion — a construct meant to unite, but that more often creates schisms. All the hot-button political issues in this country — abortion, reproductive rights, gay rights, the death penalty — all have ideological roots in religious beliefs that are often archaic or that have been cherry-picked to support specific points of view. I hope that same book can explain why our country, which was founded on religious freedom, so often finds itself tangled up in the screen that should separate church and state. Also, I would like Jon Stewart to write it, because he has a way of swiftly illuminating the truth when you think you’re just there to be entertained.

Whom would you want to write your life story?

Nathaniel Philbrick. First off, compared with the Revolutionary War or the wreck of the Essex, my life would be a cakewalk to research. In addition, Nat’s the consummate historian, a detailed investigator, and his writing is captivating — something that is not a given for nonfiction. But most of all, he’s just a really nice, humble guy.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

Please do not tell my former professors, but I never finished Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” and yet still managed to pass my comps and graduate with honors.

What do you plan to read next?

“The Book of Unknown Americans,” by Cristina Henríquez.

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Leaving Time

Jodi Picoult | 4.19 | 141,682 ratings and reviews

Ranked #4 in Elephant , Ranked #36 in Animal Behavior — see more rankings .

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Leaving Time is ranked in the following categories:

• #63 in Adultery
• #67 in Grief
• #41 in Learn English

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Leaving Time (Picoult)

Leaving Time   Jodi Picoult, 2014 Random House 416 pp. ISBN-13: 9780345544926 Summary Throughout her blockbuster career, #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult has seamlessly blended nuanced characters, riveting plots, and rich prose, brilliantly creating stories that “not only provoke the mind but touch the flawed souls in all of us” ( The Boston Globe ). Now, in her highly anticipated new book, she has delivered her most affecting novel yet—and one unlike anything she’s written before. For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe that she would be abandoned as a young child, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts. Desperate to find the truth, Jenna enlists two unlikely allies in her quest. The first is Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons—only to later doubt her gifts. The second is Virgil Stanhope, a jaded private detective who originally investigated Alice’s case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues. As the three work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they realize that in asking hard questions, they’ll have to face even harder answers. As Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish. A deeply moving, gripping, and intelligent page-turner, Leaving Time is Jodi Picoult at the height of her powers. ( From the publisher .)

Author Bio • Birth—May 19, 1966 • Where—Nesconset (Long Island), New York, USA • Education—B.A., Princeton University; M.Ed., Harvard University • Currently—lives in Hanover, New Hampshire Jodi Lynn Picoult is an American author. She was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003. Picoult currently has approximately 14 million copies of her books in print worldwide. Early life and education Picoult was born and raised in Nesconset on Long Island in New York State; when she was 13, her family moved to New Hampshire. Even as a child, Picoult had a penchant for writing stories: she wrote her first story— "The Lobster Which Misunderstood"—when she was five. While still in college—she studied writing at Princeton University—Picoult published two short stories in Seventeen magazine. To pay the bills, after graduation she worked at a variety of jobs, including copy writing and editing textbooks; she even taught eighth-grade English and attained a Masters in Education from Harvard University. In 1989, Picoult married Timothy Warren Van Leer, whom she met in college, and while pregnant with their first child, wrote her first book. Song of the Humpbacked Whale , her literary debut, came out in 1992. Two more children followed, as did a string of bestseller novels. All told, Picoult has more than 20 books to her name. Writing At an earlier time in her life, Picoult believed the tranquility of family life in small-town New England offered little fodder for writing; the truly interesting stuff of fiction happened elsewhere. Ironically, it is small-town life that has ended up providing the settings for Picoult's novels. Within the cozy surroundings of family and friends, Picoult weaves complex webs of relationships that strain, even tear apart, under stress. She excels at portraying ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Disoriented by some accident of chance, they stumble, whirl, and attempt to regain a footing in what was once their calm, ordered world. Nor has Picoult ever shied from tackling difficult, controversial issues: school shooting, domestic violence, sexual abuse, teen suicide, and racism. She approaches painful topics with sympathy—and her characters with respect—while shining a light on individual struggles. Her legions of readers have loved and rewarded her for that compassion—and her novels have been consistent bestsellers. Personal life Picoult and her husband Timothy live in Hanover, New Hampshire. They have three children and a handful of pets. ( Adapted from a 2003 Barnes and Noble interview and from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/28/2016 .)

Book Reviews Longtime fans of Picoult will recognize some of her stock characters—the precocious, sassy teenager; the distant, philosophical mother; the curmudgeonly surrogate father figure—as well the her trademark twist ending, which may well be her strangest to date. When she diverges from her usual formula her storytelling skills are most evident. Publishers Weekly [The] heroine...voice, combined with Picoult’s fascinating research on elephants and their behavior, adds layers to the narrative’s complexity. At the end, readers will be stunned and satisfied, as the surprise is indeed a well-kept secret. Library Journal

Discussion Questions 1. Despite their different backgrounds, Jenna, Serenity, and Virgil form a sort of unconventional family together. What do you think brings them together? Have you ever had a similar experience of finding support from an unlikely source? 2. Alice says that 98 percent of science is quantifiable, leaving 2 percent “that can’t be measured or explained. And yet that does not mean it doesn’t exist.” (p. 392) Do you agree or disagree? Can you think of examples from the book or from your own experience of something that fits into that 2 percent? 3. Virgil grapples with helping Jenna when he suspects discovering the truth might be more painful to her than never knowing. Have you ever been in a situation where you knew a truth that it might hurt someone to hear? What did you do? 4. Serenity’s fake psychic readings are successful, she says, because people look for sense in the nonsensical. Do you agree or disagree? If a psychic reading brings someone comfort or helps them grieve, do you think it matters if the message is faked? 5. Jenna meets up with another character at the very end of the book. (pp. 394–395) Were you surprised to see who that was? Why or why not? 6. Alice describes some amazing examples of elephants appearing to exhibit grief and empathy, which are drawn from real–life research. Discuss some of the ways elephant grief is depicted. How is it the same as human mourning? How is it different? 7. One of the major themes of  Leaving Time is loss and how to cope with it. Discuss some of the ways the characters in this novel deal with their losses. Do you identify with any of these coping mechanisms more than others? How do you approach loss? 8. Do you think Thomas’s erratic and upsetting behavior justifies Alice’s affair with Gideon? What would you have done in Alice’s place? 9. Jenna compares her search for her mother to Captain Ahab’s search for the whale in Moby-Dick, or Javert hunting Jean Valjean in  Les Misérables, saying they are all three defined by their search. Do you agree with this assessment? Have you ever felt defined in this way by something you wanted? 10. Why do you think Serenity loses her gift? And why do you think Jenna is able to help bring it back? 11. Do you believe in ghosts? If you could communicate with anyone who has passed away, who would it be? 12. Discuss the significance of the title  Leaving Time . What is the literal meaning that Jenna ascribes to the phrase as a baby? What are some other ways the title could be interpreted? 13. “Negative moments get remembered. Traumatic ones get forgotten.” (p. 12) What do you think this means? Do you agree or disagree? Have you ever experienced something and discovered later that someone else remembers it completely differently? ( Questions issued by the publisher .)

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Leaving Time Summary & Study Guide

Leaving Time Summary & Study Guide Description

(Please note this plot summary and some sections of the guide contain spoilers for a major plot twist.)

The love of a daughter for her mother transcends even death in the novel “Leaving Time” by Jodi Picoult. Psychic Serenity Jones believes she has lost the ability to communicate with spirits when thirteen-year-old Jenna Metcalf comes to her for help in locating her mother, Alice Metcalf. Alice had disappeared the same day another woman was killed on the grounds of the New England Elephant Sanctuary. Jenna can’t believe her mother would have abandoned her willingly. Her hunch turns out to be right as she, Serenity and Virgil Stanhope, one of the cops who originally investigated the incident at the sanctuary, work together to unwind the mystery of Jenna’s past. The plot of the novel takes the reader through a variety of twists and turns in Jenna’s search for answers.

When Jenna decides to take her search for her missing mother into her own hands, she begins by contacting a psychic. Although her mother was a scientist, dedicated to researching elephant behavior, one of her journals includes a statement that even in science, there is a small part of some things that can’t be explained except by magic or the paranormal. When Jenna contacts Serenity, she does not know that Serenity’s career and name were tarnished years prior when she incorrectly predicted a senator’s kidnapped son would be found alive. Serenity has not heard from her spirit guides or from anyone in the spirit world since that time. However, after Jenna contacts Serenity, Serenity has a dream about Jenna’s mother and then later a computer glitch that she interprets as someone on the other side indicating to her she needs to help Jenna.

Meanwhile, Jenna also gets in touch with Virgil Stanhope, the washed up, alcoholic private investigator who had originally helped in the investigation of the death at the elephant sanctuary the night her mother disappeared. Although Jenna doesn’t know it, Virgil has been plagued by guilt because he believes he did not handle that case properly. Even though there were signs a murder had been committed, Virgil’s commanding officer encouraged him to ignore the evidence because he was getting pressure from the government to hush up the incident.

Together, the unlikely trio of investigators unravels the mystery behind Alice’s disappearance and discover that although Alice had run away from the elephant sanctuary that night, it was not she but Jenna who was missing. The novel address themes of grief and abandonment, mental illness and the paranormal as well as the helplessness one can fall into when questioning his own abilities.

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Leaving Time Mass Market Paperback – April 1, 2016

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• Book 1 of 1 Leaving Time
• Print length 512 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Allen & Unwin
• Publication date April 1, 2016
• Dimensions 5.08 x 1.46 x 7.72 inches
• ISBN-10 1760291382
• ISBN-13 978-1760291389
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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Allen & Unwin (April 1, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1760291382
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1760291389
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.08 x 1.46 x 7.72 inches
• #2,134,881 in Literature & Fiction (Books)

About the author

Jodi picoult.

Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-eight novels, including Wish You Were Here, The Book of Two Ways, A Spark of Light, Small Great Things, Leaving Time, and My Sister's Keeper, and, with daughter Samantha van Leer, two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page. Picoult lives in New Hampshire.

Her next novel, Mad Honey, co-written with Jennifer Finney Boylan, is available on October 11th.

Follow Jodi Picoult on Intagram, Twitter, and Facebook: @jodipicoult

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