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Review - Between the Lines by Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer

Reviewed by Amanda Keats

Book-lovers have been escaping into a good book for centuries. Imagine what it would be like though if, when you closed the book, the characters you loved stopped acting out their designated roles and could be their normal selves? What if Elizabeth Bennett wanted to dye her hair and walk around in miniskirts and vest tops? What if Heathcliff was actually a very quiet, sensitive man who loved nothing more than painting landscapes? What if Bridget Jones spoke with a posh accent and wrote poetry?

Fairytale hero Oliver is sick of replaying over and over the plot of Between the Lines. He is always the hero, on a quest to save his love, Seraphina. Over and over again, every time a new reader picks up a copy of the book. Except Seraphina is actually an imbecile who believes the parts they each play in the story and though Oliver enjoys playing chess with his best friend and cares greatly for the woman playing his mother, he wants out. Delilah, on the other hand, is a misfit teen, struggling to fit in and make her mother proud in the absence of her father. Delilah cannot bring herself to part with her copy of Between the Lines, the child's fairytale she discovered at the school library. When one day she voices out loud her wish that the book's hero, Oliver, were actually real, she is stunned to see him turn and look back at her. It is only when he uses his knife to scratch the words "help me" into the cliff wall that the adventure really begins.

Jodi Picoult's Top Tips for Aspiring Writers

Jodi Picoult is the bestselling author of numerous books including My Sister's Keeper, Change of Heart, Handle With Care, Sing You Home and Nineteen Minutes. Her most recent book Lone Wolf was released in February and she is due to release her first young adult book Between the Lines this July, which she co-wrote with her teenage daughter Sammy.

Here are her top tips for aspiring authors:

• First of all carve time out to write every day. It sounds silly but so many people are more concerned with figuring out how to write and reading books on writing that they forget they have to write.

• Take a writing workshop course because it will teach you how to create on demand and how to become your own best editor.

• Do not self-publish (at least right now). The market is not right. There's no way to separate the wheat from the chaff and what you miss out on when you self-publish is the strength of the marketing and the PR department of a traditional publisher that really allows you to get people to know your book is out there. That's incredibly important because what good is it to have written a wonderful book if nobody even knows it's there to read?

  OUR REVIEW OF LONE WOLF BY JODI PICOULT

Exclusive! Novelicious Chats to... Jodi Picoult

By Amanda Keats

 I t's  a  busy life for bestselling author Jodi Picoult. Over in the UK this week to talk about her new book Lone Wolf, Jodi still found time to try on a ball gown for her teenage daughter Sammy who will be joining her on another trip to the UK this summer to promote their young adult book Between the Lines. I caught up with her - post shopping trip - to discuss where she gets her ideas from, how she got kicked off the film set of My Sister's Keeper … oh and wolves.

 

  

Your books deal with complex ethical and moral dilemmas. What led you to write along these lines, given that the first book you wrote [Songs of the Humpback Whale] was not quite as heavy?

I think I just gravitated towards that as the type of stuff I wanted to write about. When I think about my first book, I think of it as a story about a mother and a daughter. My second book was really about a marriage and from there, the thing about the marriage that twisted it was post-partem depression and that was really the first time an issue sort of entered in and hit my characters smack on. I liked it – so I think that's why I kept gravitating towards them.

I tend to write about the things that keep me up at night, things I worry about. I think the reason that they feel timely is because everyone else is worrying about the same things.

"I tend to write about the things that keep me up at night, things I worry about."