Leaving Time

Leaving Time is Jodi Picoult’s 2014 novel, one of her more ambitious in terms of subject and structure. The narrator, Jenna Metcalf, is a thirteen year old girl whose mother, the elephant researcher Alice Metcalf, disappeared from a New England elephant sanctuary ten years earlier when Jenna was three. There was a death at the sanctuary that night, and the case has never been satisfactorily resolved. Alice was missing, blood was found, but no one has ever known whether she ran or whether something happened to her. Jenna, now old enough to investigate on her own, hires a faded psychic named Serenity Jones and a once celebrated detective named Virgil Stanhope to help her find out what actually happened.

The novel alternates between three voices. Jenna’s contemporary investigation, Serenity’s first person account, and Virgil’s narration of his own work on the case. Threading through all three is a fourth voice, the journals and research notes of Alice herself, which give the reader a window into the years Alice spent studying elephant grief and elephant memory in Africa and at the New England sanctuary. The elephant material is the heart of the book and is the most distinctive thing about it. Jodi Picoult did extensive research on actual elephant cognition, on the long memories of these animals, and on the way they grieve their dead, and the wider novel is structured around the parallels between elephant grief and human grief in ways that earn the comparison.

The novel builds toward a twist ending that some readers found revelatory and others found frustrating. The handling of the supernatural elements through Serenity’s character is more substantial than the genre might suggest, with Picoult treating the question of whether Serenity’s gift is real with the kind of careful ambiguity that gives the resolution its power.

For readers who liked My Sister’s Keeper or House Rules, Leaving Time is Picoult working at her most ambitious. The elephant research alone is worth the price of admission. For readers who have lost someone, the book deals with grief in ways that can be genuinely consoling.