Any new novel by New York Times Best-selling author Jodi Picoult is a cause to celebrate. My loyal readers and subscribers to thriftymommastips and thriftymommasbrainfood know how much I love this author. I have read almost every book she has written, in fact I am pretty sure I have read the entire Jodi Picoult oeuvre. So when I finished her last book Sing You Home, I asked my friend Wanda @YMCBookalicious who has interviewed the author, what was next. I was both shocked and intrigued by the idea of this one and the setting. Wolves and end of life themes? The potential was intriguing. Now maybe I am spoiled by Picoult’s many magnificent books like House Rules, My Sister’s Keeper, Faith and Mercy and all those gorgeous novels. I am often spellbound by her plots and head over heels for the characters that spring from her imagination, which is maybe why I find it so hard to say that I sadly found Lone Wolf underwhelming. My love for Jodi Picoult’s novels is well established. I have reviewed many of her other books. I have loved many, and wished I had written many, and truly admired her skill and penchant for research. And yet Lone Wolf, her latest, was merely Meh for me.
Lone Wolf is the story of Luke Warren and his pack. When he is critically injured in a car accident at the start of the book, Warren’s family struggles to pull him back or let him go. This is an end of life saga that explores when life begins and ends and brain trauma and family relationships. Not surprisingly conflict comes in children at odds with each other. One refuses to let father die and the other fights vehemently to not extend the life support systems. I felt there was so much more potential for the sibling relationship here to be relevant and contemporary and perhaps even emotional and real. And yet it stays on the page. Flat. How I love the metaphor at work here. It is smart and well used. The family as a pack metaphor comes full circle towards the end and as a reader I enjoyed that. As a writer I appreciate this stylistically. Warren, the lone wolf, is a world renowned wildlife biologist who loses himself in his work and immerses himself into a wolf pack, accepted as one of their own. He eats when they eat, dines on raw calf, until he gets too sick from doing so, and sleeps outdoors with them. In the wild as part of a wolf pack he finds his senses heightened – this is a sub-theme carried over from House Rules, where our main character had Asperger’s syndrome and clear sensory processing disorder as well. Warren is larger than life, appearing on TV and magazine covers after he emerges from his experiment. We learn that he has written a book and his wife is remarried and at least one of his children is alienated from him. His young teenage daughter Cara is however fiercely devoted, having chosen to live with her father and not her remarried mother.
The research here, is as usual, amazing. I learned more about wolves than I ever could from reading a non fiction book about the same topic. So what doesn’t work for me? Well the family dynamic is great and I love that the characters are all constantly changing in ways we cannot quite get a grip on until nearly the end of the story. I love the comparisons to the alpha male and female wolves. The problem with this one for me is that the emotional investment is weak. I expect to love at least one of Picoult’s characters and relate to one. I expect to have the carpet yanked out from under my feet near the end. It is a Picoult device. But not here. No compelling twist at end. No heartbreaking characters. Luke, in all of his mythical stature, is never really likable. I get that his character lingers between life and death and his viewpoint is established in a sort of series of flashbacks, interspersed between other character’s viewpoints. But because he is never really likable, he is merely a device to forward the story in some ways. I expected deeper character development of Luke. And I expect deeper characters from Picoult.
There were many moments in this book where I sighed as I felt I had read it before. Especially when Cara bolted from her hospital bed and went straight to a lawyer’s office. Too many similarities with My Sister’s Keeper and every other Picoult novel in which a trial is featured. Even when Picoult is not at the top of her game, she is still worth reading. But frankly as a fan of her body of work I would very much recommend starting with a different one of her novels.
Lone Wolf, by Jodi Picoult, Simon and Schuster Canada, $32, 421 pages
By now Jodi’s fans know of her penchant for ripping headline making sagas and plots and twisting them into best-sellers. They all know too of her reliance on courtroom drama. Perhaps its time to change the formula, because this one, although well researched, fell flat and predictable.
This one gets a $$$ 1/2 out of $$$$$.
Disclosure: I received a copy of this book for free. My opinion is all my own.