The Tenth Circle

Picoult's MY SISTER'S KEEPER is one of the best books I've read. Now I compare all of her books against MSK;I always expect the best, but this time I was disappointed. While the story was riveting and the characters compelling, I felt that the resolution was a bit too predictable and with no true ending. The narrator added to the enjoyment of the story, but I can't whole-heartedly recommend THE TENTH CIRCLE.

Definitely not a typical Picoult novel. I found the story far fetched and boring most of the time. Although, there was a couple of times it held my attention, mostly I couldn't wait to be finished with it. Such the case, I will still be awaiting her next book. Hopefully she has taken some time off and can recover her absolute wonderful storytelling abilities.

I was very disappointed with this book. If this was the first Jodi Picoult book I listened to it would have been my last.

On and on and on. You have self centered, self absorbed daughter trixie, clueless father daniel, lame mother laura, and a gaggle of high school characters who are stereotyped x10. Not one person seems to say what they mean, react appropriately, or do what is needed. You just can't feel sorry for these people, they make a bad choice and then just keep on making them, seemingly unable to take hold of the situation in any sort of intelligent manner. I'm better than half way through and have found myself twice trying to find a spoiler review online so I can justify giving up the ghost of this relentlessly boring, over dramatized slop.

I did like sisters keeper, though the end was a cop-out, but I don't think this is one of Picout's better works.

On the upside, the narrator was spot-on.

Having read Vanishing Acts and My Sister's Keeper, I expected more from this book. The plot was too weak to keep the reader involved. The motivation for the things that happened was not believable. I stuck with this story hoping it would improve, but the ending was a disappointment too. I would advise readers to skip this Jodi Picoulet novel and hope she does better with the next one.

Wow! I did not expect this story to be so powerful. I was completely engrossed in this story, some days I didn't even want to get out of the car!

A fabulous listen, great for everyday commuting, relaxation or to listen while doing housework!

I have read all of her books and this is my least favorite by far. Just didn't tie everything together and was short on character development.
Not the best of her work

Although there is a need to keep listening to this book, I will tell you that it is a great waste of time. Most of her novels have "what the heck" endings but this one was so slow and so disappointing. I just wish I wouldn't have wasted my time.

So I am trying to expand my horizons and this book was on sale at Audible.com. Jodi Picoult is supposed to be one of the better "women's fiction" writers, and apparently has literary pretensions, so I wanted to see how she measures up. I try not to disparage a book just because it's "chick-lit" and not my usual cup of tea, so I wanted to give it a fair chance. After all, guys aren't supposed to like Jane Austen either, and I'm a big ol' Austen fanboy.

Well, let's just say Jodi Picoult is no Jane Austen. The Tenth Circle was not a bad book; it was nicely paced, kept me engaged with the characters, pulled out a few surprises, and the writing was decent midlist fiction. But besides being very much not my cup of tea, I felt like Picoult just tried so very hard to be introspective and literary with the whole Danete's Tenth Circle thing. She makes allusions to it throughout the book, but it's pretty unsubtle when she does so by having the wife be a professor of literature who teaches Dante at the university and the husband be a comic book artist who's drawing a comic book about Dante's hell. Then there is all the winter imagery ('cause the Tenth Circle is where Lucifer is frozen in a lake of ice, get it?), and the sins of the main characters (Daniel Stone is wrathful, Laura Stone is adulterous, and Trixie turns out to be a whole basket case of teen problems)... okay, Ms. Picoult, I get it. You Are Very Literary.

Except the writing still can't escape midlist potboiler-caliber prose, and especially toward the end, I felt like Picoult was being manipulative as hell.

The story is certainly one that will resonate with your typical reader with a family, especially if you have a daughter. Trixie is a fourteen-year-old with a boyfriend. Her boyfriend dumps her, and she goes into Bella Swan-mode (clingy, desperate, depressed, my-life-is-over, etc.) She'll do anything to get him back, including going to a party where there are copious quantities of sex, drugs, and alcohol. There, her boyfriend rapes her - or so says Trixie, while her boyfriend says it was consensual. Since we get the story from both Trixie and Jason's POV, Picoult deliberately introduces an element of doubt, except we know there is no way she is going to cast the teenage girl protagonist as a liar about her own rape, which means the various ways in which she does keep the reader guessing about what really happened struck me as artificial and didactic.

If you haven't had a bit of Feminism 101 and eduction about date rape, The Tenth Circle may strike you as powerful and it may even be helpful to some readers. To me, it seemed very much like something written to be made into an Oprah Special. I really want to be fair-minded in my review, but yeah, it's totally chick-lit, slightly better than mediocre but far from great. I wouldn't rule out giving Picoult another shot in the future, but this one didn't do it for me.

So many people love Jodi Picoult's writing that I decided to give the Jodi Picoult's Collection a listen. Not one of these books will go on my favorite's list. Listening to this book I kept looking for someone to like or root for. I couldn't stand any of the characters (which was, quite frankly, how I felt about My Sister's Keeper, too).

After listening to hours of plucked from the movie of the week sensationalism, I pulled the plug. I just couldn't stomache it anymore. It felt manipulative, cliche, and predictable. Maybe someday I'll go back and finish it. But I doubt it.