Book Review: The Tenth Circle, by Jodi Picoult

An overwrought attempt at allegory that's really just a bit of upper-middle-class angst for the whole family.

Washington Square Press, 2006, 416 pages

Fourteen-year-old Trixie Stone is in love for the first time. She's also the light of her father, Daniel's life -- a straight-A student; a pretty, popular freshman in high school; a girl who's always seen her father as a hero. That is, until her world is turned upside down with a single act of violence. Suddenly everything Trixie has believed about her family -- and herself -- seems to be a lie. Could the boyfriend who once made Trixie wild with happiness have been the one to end her childhood forever? She says that he is, and that is all it takes to make Daniel, a seemingly mild-mannered comic book artist with a secret tumultuous past he has hidden even from his family, venture to hell and back to protect his daughter.

With The Tenth Circle, Jodi Picoult offers her most powerful chronicle yet as she explores the unbreakable bond between parent and child, and questions whether you can reinvent yourself in the course of a lifetime -- or if your mistakes are carried forever.

( Tonight, a Very Special Episode of pop-lit with pretensions. )

Verdict: I wanted to be fair-minded in my foray into "women's fiction," and I was really hoping I'd find hidden depths here, but no, The Tenth Circle is just utterly average and overwrought melodrama, suitable for exactly the use to which it was put, a cable TV movie of the week. It's not even a bad book that I can properly pan -- Picoult's writing is okay and the story was structured well and had enough twists that it should have been more interesting. If it was in a genre I liked, I'd probably rate it 3 or 3.5 stars and call it entertaining if unexceptional. But literary it is not, the tinge of moral panic worked against its well-intentioned introductory-level feminism, and I resent any author who tries to lead the reader by the nose. Jodi Picoult did not impress me as someone being unfairly denied Serious Author status because of her sex, but I've certainly read worse, from both sexes.

Book Review: The Tenth Circle, by Jodi Picoult

An overwrought attempt at allegory that's really just a bit of upper-middle-class angst for the whole family.

Washington Square Press, 2006, 416 pages

Fourteen-year-old Trixie Stone is in love for the first time. She's also the light of her father, Daniel's life -- a straight-A student; a pretty, popular freshman in high school; a girl who's always seen her father as a hero. That is, until her world is turned upside down with a single act of violence. Suddenly everything Trixie has believed about her family -- and herself -- seems to be a lie. Could the boyfriend who once made Trixie wild with happiness have been the one to end her childhood forever? She says that he is, and that is all it takes to make Daniel, a seemingly mild-mannered comic book artist with a secret tumultuous past he has hidden even from his family, venture to hell and back to protect his daughter.

With The Tenth Circle, Jodi Picoult offers her most powerful chronicle yet as she explores the unbreakable bond between parent and child, and questions whether you can reinvent yourself in the course of a lifetime -- or if your mistakes are carried forever.

( Tonight, a Very Special Episode of pop-lit with pretensions. )

Verdict: I wanted to be fair-minded in my foray into "women's fiction," and I was really hoping I'd find hidden depths here, but no, The Tenth Circle is just utterly average and overwrought melodrama, suitable for exactly the use to which it was put, a cable TV movie of the week. It's not even a bad book that I can properly pan -- Picoult's writing is okay and the story was structured well and had enough twists that it should have been more interesting. If it was in a genre I liked, I'd probably rate it 3 or 3.5 stars and call it entertaining if unexceptional. But literary it is not, the tinge of moral panic worked against its well-intentioned introductory-level feminism, and I resent any author who tries to lead the reader by the nose. Jodi Picoult did not impress me as someone being unfairly denied Serious Author status because of her sex, but I've certainly read worse, from both sexes.