Small Great Things: A Novel

Picoult has a very intriguing story here. She proposes very real dilemmas, enough so to cause you to really examine previous notions. She produces a plot that maintains your interest to the very end. However, she makes a couple of misguided assumptions and ignorant statements that totally disrupted my thoughts and insulted the reader. Her comments that Tea Party members are just Klan members in disguise is ludicrous. What about Black members of the Tea Party? They do exist. What about all the other minorities who agree with the conservative views of the Tea Party? Are they racist bigots? Totally insulting!! The story could have done without these veiled insults entirely and been a good story. There are also the insults to those who watch Fox News, insinuating that there is trash news on that is unfit for children. Again, this is insulting to a great many Americans, a good majority of Americans, and it was totally unnecessary in the frame of the story. You disappoint me thoroughly, Ms. Picoult. This is the last of your books that I will read. I, by the way, am not a Tea Party member, but I know a good number of them, good people who love this country in all its diversity. Shame on you.

Author Jodi Picoult had a sermon she wanted to preach. She explains in the Author’s Note at the end of the book how she wanted to write a book about racism for two decades. In Small Great Things, she indulged her wish.Before she could preach her sermon though, she had to build a pulpit. Picoult spends the first half of her book building that pulpit from the frayed headlines of news stories over the past decade, many of which have been retracted or proved wrong. (Headlines can be unreliable.) But build it she does; laboriously, flawed, shaky and stretching the credulity of the reader. I could list the ridiculous events readers are expected to swallow, but there are too many. It would bore you, and me, to try. Read it and you can be entertained by highlighting the “ripped from the headlines” events.It’s hard to care about a story if the characters aren’t believable or sympathetic. Picoult falls short in the character development also. To support her impending sermon, she had to create characters that would serve her message, 2 dimensional almost describes them, maybe 1.5-D would be more accurate. Ruth, the black nurse, is the pure snow-white angel, Turk, the white supremacist, is the black evil devil. And so they stay until the end when Ruth is saved by a now-enlightened social justice warrior public defender trust baby, and Turk is redeemed by his love for his wife who he finds out is half black. (Oh! The irony!) Don’t worry, Turk’s half black wife is conveniently disposed of to allow him an uncomplicated redemption.The preaching really gets going in the trial, which starts after the pulpit is sufficiently built. We are expected to forget the shaky, inconsistent and defective foundation and now focus on the problem of racism, and white privilege. After all, Picoult tells us in the Author’s Note that her intended audience is the privileged white class that arrogantly claims not to see color.I’m still left to wonder why people with a smidge more melanin in the top layer of their skin still need to be rescued, saved, explained and all the other patronizing remedies privileged whites foist on their behalf. How condescending. When will melanin-challenged people allow abundant-melanin people to be something other than victims? When will abundant-melanin people refuse to be classified as victims. I guess as long as there is money to be made and power to be had while pushing that meme, we will need a victim class.

I am South African. I grew up in apartheid South Africa. Nelson Mandela was released from prison when I was 18 years of age.It was a renewing of the mind for me. I had to learn to think differently. I had to see things differently. It sounds crazy, but it was as if I was brainwashed. Brainwashed by my country and by my upbringing.But, South Africa legalized apartheid, named it, called it into existence. As wrong as that is, it was out there, known to all.When I read small great things, I felt like America had this disease, this underlying disease that no one knew about. It rots from the inside. And the entire nation walks around pretending it's all ok.In some ways, in South Africa, we are blessed, our disease was a big rotting sore, and we cut it open and it oozed puss and blood and it was not nice to look at, and it was shameful, but we knew it was there and that we had to do something about it. So we cut it open and exposed it to the world, but most importantly to ourselves, and that is where the healing began. We still have a lot to learn, we still have a long road ahead, but we are healing and learning to love again. I pray the same for America.

As a "successful middle-class" African-American woman I was truly stunned to recognize so many aspects of my own life in Ruth. I have read every Picoult book - some twice - but never have I had my own experiences articulated so effectively by someone who isn't a person of color. I finished it yesterday morning and was rattled all day by the insights and depth of honesty revealed here. I still am, but had to take a moment to post everywhere and say THANK YOU!! Jodi, I read your acknowledgments of how you created this book, and I wish I could meet you. I am awed and will recommend this book to anyone I know: starting with my husband. Blessings to you for your courage, research and determination to see beyond what you knew, what was comfortable - and take this risk.

As many reviewers have said, this is a thought provoking read. Racism and whether or rather, how far we are all racist, is such a difficult subject for discussion, but Jodi Picoult’s book should enable us in some measure to begin that debate.The reviewer who said she stopped reading after the point of Ruth’s arrest because it was “unrealistic “, should perhaps familiarise herself more with the American legal system and be grateful she doesn’t live there! Which is turn makes me think an interesting discussion would be how far different are things in America? I was shocked that the presumption of free speech in the USA would allow an organisation such as a hospital to forbid an African-American nurse to treat a white child. Unless I am very wrong, that would be illegal here.But as many other readers have also said, I found myself questioning my innate racism. I hope this book will stay with me and keep challenging me to face up to deep-seated and ingrained prejudices.

Bought this book on a whim. And so glad I did. A really stimulating read! My first Jodi Picoult novel and I wasn’t disappointed. She wove the story perfectly. I liked the way the chapters jumped back and forth between 3 different characters - Turk (the father of the baby who died) Ruth (the nurse accused of killing the baby) and Kennedy (Ruth’s public defender).It isn’t a courtroom drama as such - I found the courtroom aspect enough and not long winded or boring. It kept you gripped. The story is based on a baby of a white supremacist who dies in hospital shortly after being born. The nurse accused of killing him is African American. I highly recommend this book. It kept me turning the pages!

I have enjoyed a number of Jodi Picoult’s novels but not this one. I was very disappointed and only read to page 95.I did not like the racial undertone nor the medical abbreviations and jargon. I was not happy with the narrative and did not like any of the characters.I could see where the story was going and did not want to go there. Once I start skipping paragraphs (which I did frequently during Turks narrative) I know it’s time to give up.Disappointing

As a long-time fan of Jodi Picoult's books, the combination of medical ethics and legal storylines make for entertaining reading. This one, however, was a presentation on racial inequalities in America - a great and very important topic, but one that should probably not be voiced by a white woman in this way. In narrating through the Black nurse at the centre of the story, Picoult does a decent job, but I couldn't help but feel those words should come from somebody else. The white lawyer's ultimate 'wokeness' was preachy. Perhaps good for people with little understanding of the issues of race in America, but for anyone with a understanding beyond 101 level, it was ultimately an awkward read.

My overall opinion on this one is that I liked it, but mainly because it was such a good discussion book, not because of the actual story. Now, that may sound controversial, that I didn’t enjoy the bulk of a book all about racism, but that’s not what I mean. Let me explain…I think this book did an amazing job at opening up the topic of racism to the reader. As a white woman, living in a pretty middle class existence, I know for a fact that I have unfair privileges and I will never fully understand the complexities of racism, as much as I try to educate myself. This novel certainly has opened my eyes to the some of the more subtle aspects of racism that I hadn’t even thought about before. While there were the obvious racist themes in this novel, it wasn’t those that shocked me the most, it was the parts that you don’t often think about when you think of racism. So for that, for opening my eyes and my mind, I applaud Picoult for writing such a difficult and controversial book.However, I think the teachings of this book could have been done in a more compelling story. At the end of the day, there was nothing inherently wrong with the plot, but I didn’t quite connect with it. I found a lot of it unexciting and the “twist” at the end, that Picoult just has to add into each one of her books, was so blatantly obvious it didn’t surprise me at all and kind of made the rest of the book feel a bit cheap?Picoult’s writing isn’t my favourite, it doesn’t suck me in as much as other authors, but its still weaves a pretty interesting story. I think the characters in this book were far stronger than the plot.My favourite part of this novel was watching Ruth and Kennedy’s relationship grow. I loved seeing how Kennedy steadily grew to understand Ruth’s frustrations and her plight to bring race to the forefront of people’s minds.Overall, I did enjoy this book, mainly because of what it taught me and how it’s made me see things in a different way. But, it’s not the most exciting story I’ve ever read and I’m not big on the writing style.