Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult

This week I finished reading Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult. I loved it!

I have found that my reading goes in phases. For a long time now I have been "off" fiction. Nothing that was coming out was interesting me in the least and I've been reading a lot of nonfiction (mostly religious) instead. But I've felt a yearning for a good story again so I was browsing around the library shelves last weekend and I stumbled upon the Jodi Picoult section. Ah, yes, Jodi Picoult. I read something by her a couple of years ago...I think it was Keeping Faith. I like Picoult's books because they aren't the "romance-y" kind of supermarket books that seem to be everywhere. I'm just not at a point in my life where I have much interest in the strictly romance kind of read. But Picoult's books, while they may have a secondary romance element, the main story is usually something else.

In Vanishing Acts, the main character (Delia) is a 31-year-old woman with a four-year-old daughter. Despite the fact that she grew up without her mother whom, she was told, died when she was only four, she feels she had a charmed childhood. Her father was the best parent she could imagine and was always there for her. When a police officer shows up at her door and arrests her father for kidnapping her, her world is thrown into a tailspin. She returns half-way across the country to a town and a mother she'd all but forgotten to learn the truth about who she is.

This was a page-turner and I really loved it. It's one of those books where after you finish it you sit and wonder what is happening to your old friends from the book. You start to miss the characters and wish it hadn't ended.

Anyway, Picoult has published many books, so I plan to go back and read them while the fiction bug has me.