Birthday Blog

Thank you to everyone who has already sent me birthday wishes - you've been lovely and it's made today feel very special and warm for me. In spite of the grey clouds and whirling wind outside.

I'm having a very relaxing birthday - a birthday is a day to do just what you want - right? So I've spent a large amount of time curled in an armchair with a book that I just didn't want to put down until I'd finished it.

No - not a romance but another book by an author I've mentioned on here before - Jodi Picoult. This book was Vanishing Acts - the third novel by this fabulous author that I've read. The others being My Sister's Keeper and The Pact . It was my eldest sister who introduced me to Jodi Picoult when I was staying with her in Tasmania a couple of years ago. If you like her you'll become addicted she warned and she was right - though it took me a couple of years to get round to reading the first book. (I didn't dare pick one from my sister's collection in case I didn't have time to finish it while I was there - and I would have been right. Being left with the plot dangling and not sorted out would have been a reader's torment!)

When I was at Caerleon last year, a literary agent described Jodi Picoult's books as 'issue' books. To call them that is to do them a disservice. OK, the plots are based around some highly emotive issues - like the one in My Sister's Keeper - where a child has been conceived specially to provide the life-saving bone marrow needed by her desperately ill sister - but that is not all they are about. And those 'issues' would be desperately dull and uninvolving without the sympathetic, ambiguous, and rounded characters that Picoult creates.

Put Jodi Picoult into Google and you'll get her web site labelled Novels About Family, Relationships, and Love. That's more like it. The books are written from the points of view of many of the main characters involved so that the chapter become like dozens

of mirrors lined up besides, in front of and behind each other, each of them reflecting a slightly different angle, or turning an image back on itself so that you see it very differently from the way you believed things to be. An apparently non sympathetic characters reveals their real reasons for doing something, or a new voice tells you something that only they could know and suddenly you are made to review the conclusions you have come to and question whether they hold up any more. If there is one thing that comes out of the books I have read it's that no one is black and white, there a re innumerable shades of grey and one person's right may never ever be compatible with another's. But that doesn't make it any less right - for them.

Fascinating stuff. They are books that grab your emotions and twist hard - they are clearly fiction, spellbinding page turners and yet they force you to think about what you would do in the circumstances if you were forced into them. Because of the multiple viewpoints used you get to know all of her characters so well that you care what happens and - like me this morning, you would kill if you were forced to put the book down just as you're getting to the verdict in the trial or whatever the conclusion is.

As one of the quotes on Jodi Picoult's web site says:

“Nothing is ever all said and done in a Picoult novel. One can imagine the ripples of these characters' lives echoing on and on, even after the last page has been turned. Odds are, you'll wish you hadn't turned it. ”

Yep - that's how I felt as I closed Vanishing Acts with a sigh an hour or so ago. Luckily for me there are plenty more where that came from. I have Plain Truth and The Tenth Circle lined up - the only problem is finding time to sit down and read them because they're not books I like to read in snatches here and there. What I'd really like for my birthday is some 'time vouchers' - for an extra day here or there to be spent doing nothing but reading.

Now I'm going to do the very ladylike thing of going out for afternoon tea - it would be wonderful if you could all join me. I'll raise a cup to you all anyway!

PS to my last post - Does Sid need appeasing? He gets more than his fair share of exposure on this site as it is - and his fans only have to go back to May 1st if they need proof of that. And as he got to share in the birthday celebrations with a little smackeral or two of salmon right now he's perfectly happy thank you. (or should that be purrfectly happy?). Here he is sleeping off the treat.

It's the old gentleman Bob who has a sore and swollen paw who is complaining. He just won't accept that he's not the right age for leaping down from garage roofs any more - in fact, how he got his elderly fram up there in the first place amazes me.