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Second Glance: A Novel
by Jodi Picoult
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Atria (2003-04-22)
ISBN: 0743462661
EAN: 9780743462662
Dewy Decimal #: 813.54
Hardcover: 560 pages
Edition: Lrg
SKU: 070607001
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: This copy is a First Atria Books large-print hardcover edition - full line of numbers 1-10 in excellent condition. No markings, highlights, tears. Nice, clean, tight text & spine. Clean hardcover. Dustjacket has light shelf wear. A remarkable copy at an affordable price. (F58)
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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.com
Ghosts and ghost hunters collide in this compelling tale of the paranormal set in Vermont's green mountains. When the patriarch of the Abenaki Indian tribe that was nearly eradicated by that state's eugenics project in the 1930s encounters Ross Wakeman, the miraculous survivor of several attempted suicides who wants nothing more than to be reunited with the woman he loved and lost, they set in motion a chain of events that will unravel an ancient murder and lead to a second chance at life and love for the victim's descendants. Picoult, author of Salem Falls, brings the past alive and peoples it with a cast of extraordinarily well-realized characters whose reach into the future touches the lives of a dying boy, a frightened girl, and their mothers--two women who've given up on love until the revenants stirred up by a plan to develop an ancient burial ground show them what they're missing. Second Glance is an intricate and suspenseful ghost story that enchants and illuminates all the way to its powerful conclusion. --Jane Adams
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Book Description
"Sometimes I wonder....Can a ghost find you, if she wants to?" An intricate tale of love, haunting memories, and renewal, Second Glance begins in current-day Vermont, where an old man puts a piece of land up for sale and unintentionally raises protest from the local Abenaki Indian tribe, who insist it's a burial ground. When odd, supernatural events plague the town of Comtosook, a ghost hunter is hired by the developer to help convince the residents that there's nothing spiritual about the property. Enter Ross Wakeman, a suicidal drifter who has put himself in mortal danger time and again. He's driven his car off a bridge into a lake. He's been mugged in New York City and struck by lightning in a calm country field. Yet despite his best efforts, life clings to him and pulls him ever deeper into the empty existence he cannot bear since his fiancée's death in a car crash eight years ago. Ross now lives only for the moment he might once again encounter the woman he loves. But in Comtosook, the only discovery Ross can lay claim to is that of Lia Beaumont, a skittish, mysterious woman who, like Ross, is on a search for something beyond the boundary separating life and death. Thus begins Jodi Picoult's enthralling and ultimately astonishing story of love, fate, and a crime of passion. Hailed by critics as a "master" storyteller (Washington Post), Picoult once again "pushes herself, and consequently the reader, to think about the unthinkable" (Denver Post). Second Glance, her eeriest and most engrossing work yet, delves into a virtually unknown chapter of American history -- Vermont's eugenics project of the 1920s and 30s -- to provide a compelling study of the things that come back to haunt us -- literally and figuratively. Do we love across time, or in spite of it?
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Download Description
"Sometimes I wonder...Can a ghost find you, if she wants to?" An intricate tale of love, haunting memories, and renewal, Second Glance begins in current-day Vermont, where an old man puts a piece of land up for sale and unintentionally raises protest from the local Abenaki Indian tribe, who insist it's a burial ground. When odd, supernatural events plague the town of Comtosook, a ghost hunter is hired by the developer to help convince the residents that there's nothing spiritual about the property. Enter Ross Wakeman, a suicidal drifter who has put himself in mortal danger time and again. He's driven his car off a bridge into a lake. He's been mugged in New York City and struck by lightning in a calm country field. Yet despite his best efforts, life clings to him and pulls him ever deeper into the empty existence he cannot bear since his fiancée's death in a car crash eight years ago. Ross now lives only for the moment he might once again encounter the woman he loves. But in Comtosook, the only discovery Ross can lay claim to is that of Lia Beaumont, a skittish, mysterious woman who, like Ross, is on a search for something beyond the boundary separating life and death. Thus begins Jodi Picoult's enthralling and ultimately astonishing story of love, fate, and a crime of passion. Hailed by critics as a "master" storyteller (Washington Post), Picoult once again ""pushes herself, and consequently the reader, to think about the unthinkable" (Denver Post). Second Glance, her eeriest and most engrossing work yet, delves into a virtually unknown chapter of American history - Vermont's eugenics project of the 1920s and 30s - to provide a compelling study of the things that come back to haunt us - iterally and figuratively. Do we love across time, or in spite of it?
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Customer Reviews
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Second time for second glance
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-09-03
This book was copyrighted in 2003. Why is it being presented as a New book? It's a good Picoult book but most of us who are her fans have read it!
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second glance: A novel
Rating  (1)
Date: 2008-09-01
When this book was advertised by Amazon it appeared that it was a new release...it was not and the book was already in our household book collection. I would ask that in the future youmake sure your adverts are ot so decieving.
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Didn't even finish
Rating (1)
Date: 2008-08-31
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Our book club was going to read and discuss this book which is the only reason I bought it. I got about 80 pages into it and realized it wasn't for me and thus I never finished it. No one in my book club liked it.
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Second Glance
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-08-22
Ross Wakeman is dead. Not buried six feet under, but dead nevertheless. He died the day his fiancée died and was never revived. Ross is tired of living, and thus begins searching for a way to reunite with his fiancée. That includes various suicide attempts, and now, paranormal investigation. He's searching for the other side, searching to see if there IS another side to life. After one last unsuccessful job searching for a ghost alongside an ostensible physic, Ross is fed up and decides to retire from the business. He travels to his sisters house in Comtosook, Vermont, where strange happenings have been occurring: the ground freezing solid in warm August weather; rose petals seemingly falling from the sky; a house, after being torn down, re-building itself. The Abenaki Indians believe it is because an ancient Indian burial ground is being disturbed and uprooted for a strip mall. Ross Wakeman is called in by the developer to search the grounds for the paranormal. There he meets Lia, a young woman with a very mysterious and even more painful story to tell. Is she a ghost? Or flesh and blood? And what of this 70 year old murder committed on that very same sight?
Jodi Picoult begins her story in 2001, then transports us to the summer of 1932, giving us insight on eugenics history and experiments, and the repercussions one eugenicist beliefs' has on his family. At first glance, one might conclude that this story is about suicide and death. And though more than one person in the book attempt suicide, in my opinion, this book is not about death in the sense that when a person dies, they are gone forever. This is about death (and love) transcending time, and people coming to terms with the past and present, to then move on to the future. Every character has their own demons, no matter what their age: a woman trying to come to terms with the fact that her nine year old son, diagnosed with a skin disease will not live a full life; that same son, knowing he will die in the near future, yet cannot live; a 102 year old man living with the past that he can't let go; a ghost trying, from the grave, to piece together a family it left behind, and a dying man, riddled with memories of past experiments and a family he orchestrated the loss of. All of this Ms. Picoult intertwines together, in a thought provoking book, with a satisfying conclusion at the end.
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One of Picoult's Best
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-07-16
This novel takes place in Vermont and is a mixture of mystery, history, Indian culture, and love story. All four aspects are nicely done. I have read several of Ms. Picoult's novels- a few stand out and stay with me, some I would not want to read a second time. This novel is in the first group. It is a complex novel with many main characters; surprisingly, the relation between them is tied together into a satisfying package with a really WOW!!! punch near the end. Although the story is complicated at first and alternates between character narratives and past and present stories, it was not hard to follow, and is such a good story that it's easy to keep reading until it all makes sense.
After I finished the book, I read an interview with the author about the historical aspects of the book. It was very interesting and I think should be included at the end of the book.
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