This week was devoted to two little girls, one almost five and the other just turned one, and it was a delightful romp of activity. From sifting sand at the beach to trying out the pool, from mixing blueberry pancakes with Grandma to icing cupcakes with Grandpa, to arts and crafts with Dad, and island walks with Mom, to stacking blocks, playing game after game and visiting with Snooty the Manatee, it was nonstop until bedtime. 
Now the house is quiet (almost too quiet), the blocks and dollhouse gone, and the counters clear. What a week it was!
TERRIFYING AND POWERFUL
Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult.
Jodi Picoult’s past novels have dealt with conflict and social issues that are not easily resolved and end up in the courtroom. Most would consider them to be women’s fiction; albeit women’s fiction with a moral underpinning and an examination of what constitutes justice. This, her latest novel, received positive reviews and a lot of critical acclaim, and, in my opinion, takes her work to a whole new level.
I read it over the course of a day and a half and was totally swept up in this case of black labor and delivery nurse, Ruth Jefferson, who is accused of causing the death of a baby on her ward. Ruth is a widow with a seventeen year old son. The father of the deceased infant is a white supremacist and the scenes describing his wilding rampages and his beliefs gave me chills. Ruth’s chief advocate in court is a white female public defender named Kennedy McQuarrie, and this is her first big case.
What makes this novel so powerful is how Picoult, in shifting the point of view among the principals, lays out the background and life experiences of these three individuals and their families and demonstrates how racism affects and infects us all. In an unexpectedly candid note to the reader at the end, Picoult details how she came to write this novel, whom she interviewed, and why the process was a game changer for how she viewed herself and her own attitudes towards race. A very timely, thought-provoking book!
A LA NINETEENTH CENTURY FICTION
Stone’s Fall by Ian Pears.
This tome of a novel (almost 600 pages) ranges back in time and place from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890 to Venice in 1867. Financier, industrialist and baron, John Stone falls out of a window and dies. Was it an accident or murder? His attractive young widow hires a journalist to locate the unknown child who is the inheritor of his estate. And thus begins a multi-layered, convoluted, and yet fascinating search into the baron’s past, his career and his relationships with a couple of intriguing women. Not much is what it seems. This novel cannot be read quickly and, although, I found it sometimes hard to keep straight one for two of the male characters, I was captivated enough to persevere even though it took me several weeks to complete. 
The book was published in 2009, and Pears states in his Author’s Note that he wanted to write a novel about a financier or industrialist in which the man’s professional life and his personal life were intertwined and he was not a monster. Pears was once a financial journalist and was surprised when the headlines in the news about the 2008 banking crisis closely resembled events he was writing about in a 19th century context.
FAMILY FARE
After several years of reading about Pier 22 in Bradenton, including its latest rating as the most popular restaurant in our area, we finally got there. It was lunch with our granddaughters and we sat outside on the terrace overlooking the Manatee River with a view of the Green Bridge. 
The menu is quite extensive, includes sushi, and the food much better than I expected. The blackened grouper sandwiches were pronounced delicious and the chicken nuggets from the children’s menu tastier than the norm. For those of us with smaller appetites, the lunch pairings are just the right size and bargain-priced at $9.00. You can order a cup of chowder with a small salad or a salad and half a sandwich. The house salad was good; the tuna salad on a croissant undistinguished.
Credits: Photo of Ian Pears (By SylviaStanley – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42515709); Pier 22 (Pier22dining.com)
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