This Is an Incredible Author

I am a big fan of reading and a big fan of Little Free Library as well. Historically, I have read a lot of non-fiction, but, as a young person, I read a lot of fiction. Once I started working, I was "too busy" with work to read "for fun" and quit reading fiction. A few years ago, I restarted with a big passion.

What I like about Little Free Library is that it is convenient, and it is good for the consumers of books, who pay nothing. For me, the best thing is that it gets me to read different authors and not have to work to hard at discovering new ones. I do use the Houston Public Library too.

In mid-June, I found a book by an author that I had never encountered, Jodi Picoult. The book, which I discuss below, sounded interesting. I liked it so much that I did some research on the author and ended up checking out a book from the library that is frequently banned. I discuss this one below as well.

About Jodi Picoult

I had never heard of Jodi Picoult when I found her book Small Great Things, but I liked it so much that I wanted to learn more about her. I quickly found out that she delivered the Princeton Commencement Speech in 2016, which was ahead of the publishing of Small Great Things (a few months later, in October 2016). Here is that video:

Jodi Picoult Delivering Graduation Commencement Speech at Princeton in 2016

In that video, I learned that not only was she delivering the Commencement Speech at Princeton, but she went there, graduating in 1987. I thought it was a good speech and that she was funny and interesting. I liked her term "accidental activist." She discussed the challenges for people of color and for women very well.

Her website has an extensive bio that discusses her family and where she lives (in New Hampshire).

About the Book that Captivated Me

The first book of hers that I read and that led me to learn more about Jodi Picoult was Small Great Things:

This book sounded interesting to me when I saw it in the box. I loved it at first and kept loving it more the more that I read. The title of the book comes from a quote of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.”

The book is about a registered nurse with 20 years of experience delivering babies in Connecticut. She is Black, which is unique at that hospital, and she has a fantastic record of doing a good job. She is assigned to a family that has already delivered a newborn, but they are racists and get her off of the assignment. The baby dies the next day, and Ruth Jefferson, the nurse, is accused of being the murderer, which she was not.

This is a book about racism that is extremely well done. According to her website, it was inspired by a true story in Flint, Michigan. I knew that Picoult was not Black, but she did such a good job of capturing the emotions of so many Black characters in the book that I was highly impressed. I like that she said on her website: "I was learning about myself. I was exploring my past, my upbringing, my biases, and I was discovering that I was not as blameless and progressive as I had imagined." I feel this as well.

About the Banned Book

The second book by Picoult that I read was Nineteen Minutes, which I checked out at the library in late June and finished reading quickly.

The book was published in 2007 and is set in a small fictional town in New Hampshire. A junior in the high school there kills 10 students and hurts many others with a gun. It is fiction, but it seems to have been related to the Columbine shooting from a few years earlier.

The book was about bullying, as the shooter was bullied his entire life. Picoult does a good job of creating characters across generations. I really liked Josie, the daughter of a judge and the girlfriend of one of the ten that was killed. She was actually a friend of the shooter when they were very young. I also liked the shooter's mother, a midwife.

I thought this book was fantastic, but it has been highly banned according to PEN America. Picoult explained it:

Having the most banned book in the country is not a badge of honor – it’s a call for alarm. Nineteen Minutes is banned not because it’s about a school shooting, but the because of a single page that depicts a date rape and uses anatomically correct words for the human body. It is not gratuitous or salacious, and it is not – as the book banners claim – porn. In fact, hundreds of kids have told me that reading Nineteen Minutes stopped them from committing a school shooting, or showed them they were not alone in feeling isolated. My book, and the ten thousand others that have been pulled off school library shelves this year, give kids a tool to deal with an increasingly divided and difficult world. These book banners aren’t helping children. They are harming them.

Conclusion

Jodi Picoult is a very smart person who makes great efforts in life and with her books. I liked both of the books by her that I read in June, and they won't be my last. I have checked out By Any Other Name. She is like another author that I discovered this year, Barbara Delinsky, in that they both are using fiction to teach important things about life. They both inspire me!