Book of the Week #11: Tenth Circle

The book I read this week was Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult. I’d read her books in the past, mostly when she reached her peak with My Sister’s Keeper, but this one was new for me. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I liked some of her other books, but it was okay. Here’s the synopsis, as taken from Jodi Picoult’s website.

When Daniel Stone was a child, he was the only white boy in a native Eskimo village where his mother taught, and he was teased mercilessly because he was different. He fought back, the baddest of the bad kids: stealing, drinking, robbing and cheating his way out of the Alaskan bush – where he honed his artistic talent, fell in love with a girl and got her pregnant. To become part of a family, he reinvented himself – jettisoning all that anger to become a docile, devoted husband and father. Fifteen years later, when we meet Daniel again, he is a comic book artist. His wife teaches Dante’s Inferno at a local college; his daughter, Trixie, is the light of his life – and a girl who only knows her father as the even-tempered, mild-mannered man he has been her whole life. Until, that is, she is date raped…and Daniel finds himself struggling, again, with powerlessness and a rage that may not just swallow him whole, but destroy his family and his future.

Trixie is a really interesting character, because she says a lot of things that were really relatable once upon a time. For instance, when she’s talking to her ex-boyfriend, she’s trying to get him to take her back, and says something like “If it’s about us, why do you get to decide it’s over?” I think we’ve all been there. In the book, it also talks about the intricacies of date rape in terms of criminal court. It’s a lot of he-said-she-said, and it’s complicated, and I felt like this novel was really good at addressing that.

Daniel was fun to read about too, because it’s interesting to see the devolution of the loving father, all while his wife is growing more and more distant. His story is mostly told through graphic novel representations of a character called WildClaw. The comic book pages were nice to look at, and there’s a secret message hidden in them, if you care to seek it.

Like I said, Picoult has done better, but this book was not too bad. I’d give it a 6/10.