Book Review: A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult

I am a big Jodi Picoult fan and I’ve been looking forward to reading this book for ages, but other books kept catching my attention and it sort of got pushed back. I have finally finished A Spark of Light and I’m sharing my review below.

A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult

Blurb from The Back Cover

The Centre for Women’s Reproductive Health offers a last chance at hope – but nobody ends up there by choice.

It’s very existence is controversial, and to the demonstrators who barricade the building every day, the service it offers is no different from legalised murder.

Now life and death decision are being made horrifyingly real; a lone protestor with a gun has taken the staff, patients and visitors hostage.

Starting at the tensest moment in the negotiations for their release, A Spark of Light unravels backwards, revealing hour by urgent hour what brought each of these people – the gunman, the negotiator, the doctors, nurses and women who have come to them for treatment – to this point.

And certainties unwind as truths and secrets are peeled away, revealing the complexity of balancing the right to life with the right to choose.

My Thoughts on The Book

Jodi Picoult is a writer who is never afraid to play around with a controversial subject and she’s definitely done it again with A Spark of Light. The characters each have strong opinions on the pro-life vs pro-choice debate, but the writing doesn’t come across as preachy and both sides of the argument have voices.

The format of the book is an interesting choice. As it states in the blurb, the book starts at the crucial point in the negotiation and then works backwards. Does it work? Honestly, no not really. I get why the book starts where it does, and I think the tense point in the negotiation is a great opening point, but after that, I would have preferred it to start at the beginning of the character’s stories and move forward.

Don’t get me wrong, the stories are still interesting enough that they kept me turning the pages, but a lot of the time, I found myself reading and thinking “huh, didn’t so and so just happen to her?” and then remembering that the story is going backwards, which to be honest, made the story unnecessarily confusing at times.

Conclusion and Rating

A Spark of Light covers an emotive topic really well and the story kept me gripped, but the weird format let it down a bit for me. It’s not my favourite Jodi Picoult book for that reason, although I will still be reading more from her. 3.5/5

You can grab your copy of A Spark of Light here.

Have you read A Spark of Light? What did you think of the way the story runs backwards? Let me know in the comments 🙂

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