To what lengths will a mother go in order to keep her child safe? In HOLLOW BONES, her 30th novel, Jodi Picoult demonstrates what a mother's love can mean in terms of a loving parent and self-sacrifice, as well as the polar opposite: what happens when a mother abdicates all responsibility for a daughter's welfare. Along the way in this emotionally fraught work, we come to see different types of love and the life-changing results that emanate from flawed humans making mistakes. 

Molly Fitzgerald was two months old when her mother was killed as she went to a doctor's appointment at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Molly was luckier than some; she had her mother's best friend, Evie, who stepped in and became her mother. Evie married Molly's father, Adam, and although Molly missed the mother she never knew, Evie gave her all the love she could. Because the 9/11 disaster played such an important role in Molly's life, she ended up as the Chief of the Center for Emergency Preparedness and Response at the Rhode Island Department of Health.

Toward the beginning of the novel, Molly attends the 25th anniversary memorial of 9/11 in New York City. One of the many ways in which Picoult excels as an author is her ability to write an incredibly insightful narrative that brings situations to life as they also make us reflect on the human situation. Some of her writing is pure poetry, as when she describes the ceremony and the trumpeters: “They play Taps in a call-and-response that sounds like a conversation, until a solo note hangs in the air, like the smoke and dust and shock that hazed the city for weeks.” What a stunning, emotional sentence to convey the beauty, poignancy and sorrow of that moment.

"What makes HOLLOW BONES and every other Jodi Picoult novel thrilling, gripping, emotional and heartrending is her incredible ability to take impeccable research and combine it with characters we admire and empathize with as they are put in situations that we can't turn away from."

Now Molly is married, and when she discovers that she is pregnant (which is unplanned), it brings back many of the emotions she had growing up and wondering about her own mother. Will Molly be a good mother? Given her profession as an emergency planner, she clearly is able to imagine worst-case scenarios. In fact, that's a game she plays with her husband, Jesse. Jesse was an important character in Picoult’s 2004 novel, MY SISTER’S KEEPER, which finds Anna being conceived in order to donate her umbilical cord stem cells to her sister, Kate, who has cancer. When the bodily donations end up with Kate needing a kidney, Anna pursues medical emancipation, thus enabling her to make her own medical decisions. That book has a huge twist at the end, and Jesse was a troubled teenager, the third sibling to the two girls at the center of the tragedy.

Now Jesse is a detective and polygraph expert. There's a certain irony there because much of this novel focuses on the big and little lies we tell each other. We tell lies to protect ourselves, to protect others, and to get what we want. Sometimes those lies can upend our lives. As Jesse points out in his first-person narrative, “Really, the only thing you can say for sure about lying is that you've done it. If you say you haven't, well. That's a lie.” At one point, he lies to Molly because “the truth is too painful to speak out loud.”

While Picoult has chosen to tell the story in alternate timelines, there's no confusion about what happened when. The dates of each chapter are clearly labeled as is the narrator. Molly narrates much of the story, but so do others. To fans of her prior novels, the fact that the plot is complex --- with many balls being juggled at once, and new ones thrown into the mix as a twist --- will come as no surprise. 

Picoult seems almost heartless as she presents us with horrifying event after horrifying event, each one more troubling than the previous. But what she's really doing is explaining why people have their own demons. Even when someone appears to have it all, we never really know what that person has experienced. The story includes sexual abuse, mental illness, altruistic killing (caused by postpartum psychosis), natural disasters, and the fallout from seemingly harmless lies told with seemingly good intentions. We see exemplary mothers, those simply trying to do their best, and those who turn their backs when their children are being abused.

In her author's note, Picoult says that “everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were the morning of 9/11.” It was my first year of teaching, and when I heard about the first attack while with my fifth graders, I turned on the television in my classroom. While in retrospect I don't know why I wasn't fired for this, I had the students watch the news as it happened. I told them that this was something that would change all of our lives. I remember one of them saying that we should go to war, and it started a discussion about the vicissitudes of war, and that every soldier is someone's brother or father or son. Published 25 years later, this book similarly demonstrates the long-lasting effect that this tragedy has had on the American psyche.

What makes HOLLOW BONES and every other Jodi Picoult novel thrilling, gripping, emotional and heartrending is her incredible ability to take impeccable research and combine it with characters we admire and empathize with as they are put in situations that we can't turn away from. They may be heart-stopping, gut-wrenching and tear-inducing, but they hold us riveted to the pages of the story as we fly through the book to find out how she will make it all right in the end.