Is it love if you get drawn to the loneliness in the other's soul? Is it love, if you do all you can to protect your wife from the heartache of a stillborn child? Is it true that the apple never falls far from the tree? Are you truly being helpful, if you have the power to provide embryo choices to parents who do not want genetically-deformed babies? Can you dream about the person you haven't met, but about to fall in love with? Is it possible that a person only ever has one true love, that that true love is always the one you fall in love with in every life? Are there really ghosts?
This is one heck of a book. It's filled with symbolism, and is an uncommonly romantic book. It also touches on the disturbing science of eugenics (a new word I learnt in this book). The theory of sterilization for all families which are deemed to have weak human strains i.e. dominant negative traits of crime, feeblemindedness, etc. But what made the book really beautiful was the picture Jodi painted, in describing a woman's heartache, a man's loss, a mother's sacrifice. Somewhere along the lines, she paints an environment so unreal, that you know you're reading fiction, but you still believe that it is possible - that circumstances will somehow cause one to look at things in such a manner.
You know, until Jodi Picoult, I never knew there were so many ways to fall, and be, in love.
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