Small Great Things

Small Great  Things, by Jodi Picoult, Ballantine Books 2016

When New Hampshire-based best-selling writer Jodi Picoult first attempted this book, she could not complete it.  It was too soon for her.  But her second attempt took, with Amazon rankings in the three-digits, selling for months in the best seller range.  Picoult felt that it was time for individuals to look deeply at white privilege   Her characters - Ruth, a light-skinned black female nurse hit with bad luck and societal backlash via the courts; Turk, a white supremacist and his wife Brittany, the cause of Ruth's turmoil; Edison Jefferson, Ruth's star student son who, sidelined by the pain of his mother's misfortune, starts down a rough path; Adisa, Ruth's darker-skinned sister who lives on the other side of the tracks in New Haven; Francis, Turk's white supremacist iconic leader, also his father in law; and Kennedy, Ruth's defense attorney who takes the ups and downs of her case and runs us through the criminal justice system, move in and out of our sight as Picoult shows us more than one view of their lives and passions.

Readers may wonder how much of what these cardboard characters encounter as they move up and down through the trials of modern American racism is realistic.  They may ask themselves, as did this reader, whatever happened to the gender imposed restrictions and power behavior only briefly examined in this book.  All these questions are valid, but the novelist as a writer set out to construct a fictional story that hinges on the issues of racism.  And writers get to chose their subjects and structure their stories to meet the overall goal.

And so we are presented with a thriller very well suited to book groups.  The story line follows the African-American nurse who is assigned and then forbidden to care for the white supremacist's infant son.  When the child's heart rate goes bad following a routine circumcision, guess who gets blamed?  And get who gets dragged from her bedroom at three in the morning, thrown into a jail cell in only her nightgown?  And guess who ends up being defended by a young attorney for whom this felony murder case is her first?  Along the way we learn the back stories that made Turk an abusive and sadistic white supremacist.  We hear how Ruth was pushed and pulled along out of a ghetto life.  And we see how, despite her careful observance of nearly all the accepted rules of behavior and speech and dress and position, she still finds herself out of a job, out of money, and out of the life she had so carefully built for herself and her son.

Because the author presents her story in the alternating voices of Turk, Ruth, and Kennedy, we learn the different sides of the lives and minds formed by racial prejudice.  We hear about Turk's ugly white background, as well as how he loved his infant son.  We experience Ruth's shock and awakening as she discovers that she too, someone who has done the best she could and lived a "white" life, is not safe.  And with Kennedy we see an inevitable ugly awakening.  It's great drama, well-researched in the medical, legal, and social arenas that Picoult uses to set the stage for the big questions.  

Mill Girl Verdict:  great book group reading.  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, https://sites.google.com/site/blueheronjournal/, tricia@patriciaemoody.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, pemoody@aol.com