4.5/5 stars
From the Publisher:
The warm fall day starts like any other at the Center—a women’s reproductive health services clinic—its staff offering care to anyone who passes through its doors. Then, in late morning, a desperate and distraught gunman bursts in and opens fire, taking all inside hostage.
After rushing to the scene, Hugh McElroy, a police hostage negotiator, sets up a perimeter and begins making a plan to communicate with the gunman. As his phone vibrates with incoming text messages he glances at it and, to his horror, finds out that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Wren, is inside the clinic.
But Wren is not alone. She will share the next and tensest few hours of her young life with a cast of unforgettable characters: A nurse who calms her own panic in order to save the life of a wounded woman. A doctor who does his work not in spite of his faith but because of it, and who will find that faith tested as never before. A pro-life protester, disguised as a patient, who now stands in the crosshairs of the same rage she herself has felt. A young woman who has come to terminate her pregnancy. And the disturbed individual himself, vowing to be heard.
Told in a daring and enthralling narrative structure that counts backward through the hours of the standoff, this is a story that traces its way back to what brought each of these very different individuals to the same place on this fateful day.
One of the most fearless writers of our time, Jodi Picoult tackles a complicated issue in this gripping and nuanced novel. How do we balance the rights of pregnant women with the rights of the unborn they carry? What does it mean to be a good parent? A Spark of Light will inspire debate, conversation . . . and, hopefully, understanding.
My Review:
Jodi Picoult is one of my go-to authors. I love how she takes relevant, timely and often controversial issues and shows them from the perspectives of many people on different sides of the issue.
A Spark of Light is about abortion and a woman’s right to choose.
Both the gunman and the hostage negotiator are struggling with their teenage daughters growing up. Both of their daughters have been to the clinic. We don’t know Hugh, the hostage negotiator’s position on abortion, but we know that when his college girlfriend got pregnant, she had the baby and derailed his dreams of becoming an astronaut and we know he wants to save his daughter.
Jodi Picoult allows us to go inside the mind of an abortion activist who has gone undercover in the clinic on the day the hostages are taken to try to get some incriminating information about the clinic. We also go inside the mind of a woman who was raised in foster care and is struggling to put herself through college when she gets pregnant. And we get inside the head of the nurse, who is pregnant herself and was raised in poverty but now has a devoted boyfriend from a different background and she lacks the confidence to believe he could love her. We get to see the pain that each of these women is in as they come to grips with their situation.
We also get to understand the position of the doctor, who is a Christian, but whose mother died having an illegal abortion. I found his perspective to be the most interesting and the most different and things that I had never thought of before. At the end of the book, he takes one of the pro-life activists out for breakfast and they have a talk and he explains his position.
I think this is an important book. It’s easy to be on the side we are on, it’s more difficult to understand someone else’s perspective but we need to be able to do that. So often I feel that our country is becoming more and more divided. Twenty-four hour news and the de-personalization of social media and I find myself angry with people that I have been friends with for thirty years because they don’t understand my side of things or because they don’t agree with me. Politics and religion were always two things we didn’t talk about in polite company, yet now we seem to feel free to put those things on social media and it is dividing us more and more. I am guilty of it myself. I feel strongly about things and I want my voice heard. I think it’s ok to use social media as a political platform, as long as you are open to the perspectives of other people. That is what I love about Jodi Picoult’s books, she makes it easy to understand the perspectives of other people.
I would like to thank Netgalley and Random House Ballantine for my copy in exchange for my honest review.
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