Ekta | wisdomekta

“Perfect Match” is a “perfect” book that engrossed me in the 400 pages read for a night. It was worth it. And no, it is not a love story! The story begins when a career-driven assistant district attorney, Nina Frost, and her husband, Caleb, find that their five-year-old son, Nathaniel, is traumatised by a sexual assault. With deep rage and a sense of helplessness in the face of a futile justice system, the couple navigates through the justice system. But the tale is not simple. This novel also explores the themes of family conflict, individual inner turmoil and guilt, personal and professional conflict, and vengeance. Judi Picoult has once again been amazed by her emotion-filled story. It is a must-read if one is looking for drama and a page-turner. A few of the quotes from the book- “You build a wall to keep something unwanted out … or to hold something precious in.” “We have been naive enough to believe that we were invincible, that we could run blindly through the hairpi...

“The deceased could take either a land route or a water route to get to the field of offerings, which is the ancient Egyptian version of heaven. No matter which path you took, you wound up where you were supposed to be.” We are all sailing through life just to reach the end. The end , i.e. Death, is the ultimate truth being sought by life. The recent read by Jodi Picoult presented this process of life/living and death/dying through a superb tale of fiction and Egyptology. This book is an homage to an ancient Egyptian coffin text, also called “The Book of Two Ways,” which contains one of the first known maps of the underworld. In Egyptian mythology, Water and Land refer to the “Two Ways,” alternate routes to the afterlife. The story is told in multiple timelines about a middle-aged woman, Dawn, who works as Death Doula (an interesting profession which I never knew existed!!) …her choices and her way of questioning her life, and the saga of other related persons in her life...

My thorough understanding (till date) on my reading journey is that if you want to remain humble and want to be grateful for all the “luxuries” received in your life, either read Mahatma Gandhi’s book ‘ The Story of My Experiments with Truth ’ or read about the various accounts of the Holocaust survivors. These stories have constantly given me another reason to remain human and hopeful.  “The Storyteller” by American Writer Jodi Picoult is a fictional novel based on events. The story is set in two parallel times, one in the 2000s in the United States and the other during the Holocaust.  The three main characters in the novel are Sage Singer, Minka and Josef Weber. Sage Singer is a baker trying hard to live an everyday life following an accident that maimed half her face. Sage suffers from emotional and physical scars and works like a recluse post-accident trauma. Minka, the grandmother of Sage, is a Holocaust survivor. She was imprisoned at Auschwitz, and hers is t...