Joley guides Jane across the country through a series of affectionate letters, which Jane must retrieve from post offices along her route. With only a few dollars, a clapped-out car and Oliver’s dirty shirt on her back, Jane and Rebecca begin a journey across mainland America, from San Diego to an idyllic apple orchard in Massachusetts, where Jane’s younger brother Joley works.

After an argument where Jane is unexpectedly violent towards a baffled Oliver, Jane flips. Their daughter, Rebecca, survived a plane crash as a toddler and is now fifteen-years-old, sick of her parents’ indifferent marriage and eager to experience something of life. It’s quite unusual for a character to have a grudge against whales, but quite understandably Jane resents her husband for caring more about humpbacks than his family. Jane is unfortunately married to Oliver Jones, a famous oceanographer specialising in humpback whale research. Jane is no flower: she can be prickly, selfish and illogical, and yet somehow she is still very likeable – indeed, as mother characters go, she was rather refreshing. The main character, on whom so much of the plot hinges, is Jane Jones, a speech pathologist. The descriptions too are a joy: vivid, ponderous, sensual This unusual plotting was handled with a dexterity that I admired, flitting between time lines and character perspectives, but maintaining tension. The plot is not linear and we know the ending before we know how it could possibly be achieved. It is a gorgeous novel, beautifully characterised and cleverly structured. Songs of the Humpback Whale is a multi-viewpoint tale, narrated by five characters. Before reading this novel, all I knew of Jodi Picoult (apparently pronounced pee-KOE) was that she was a multi-million-selling novelist writing ‘hot topic’ women’s fiction, and that her novel My Sister’s Keeper was picked for Amanda Ross’s Richard and Judy Book Club. Songs of the Humpback Whale was Jodi Picoult’s first ever novel, released when she was just 26, and allegedly purchased by the publisher for the sum of $3000. The Thursday Soapbox will be back next week.

Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult

Songs of the humpback whale book