blog #3

I finished Second Glance and it was a really good book. In the end all the characters are linked together and the book kind of ends up being about fate and how you control your life. So Ross,the main character, has been staying with his sister Shelby. She has a son Ethan who has XP;he's allergic to the sun. Ross meets a police officer, Eli, while involved in finding the murderer. Lia is the ghost that Ross can see and they find out she is half-Abenaki Indian. Lia's husband, Spencer, is a eugenic who is trying to create the perfect race, similar to what Hitler did. When Spencer thinks that Lia's real father, Grey Wolf/John Delacour/Az Thompson, and Lia are having an affair(he doesn't find out until right before he dies that Lia was his daughter) so he sees Lia's baby with dark skin and hair, so he kills the baby. Or so he thought. The baby ends up resusitating,or some big word like that, itself and lives. Everyone working the case thought Lia was murdered but she really hung herself because she thought her baby was dead, but then heard her baby crying so tried to get free by scratching at her neck/rope. 


Ross sets out to find Lia's daughter, while at Shelby's she meets Eli and they start dating. Ross finds Lia's midwife who ends up telling him that she saved the baby, but when she told her who her real mother was she had a heart attack and died(little dramatic i think) so she's scared to tell her "granddaughter" Meredith. Meredith's daughter Lucy has been trying to tell her mom she's seeing ghosts but her mom doesnt believe in them. Ross tells Meredith, so she and Lucy go back to Vermont with him to meet her grandfather and father and sort out who owns the piece of land now. Meredith and Lucy stay with Shelby and Ethan is about the same age as Lucy. They become friends and make a pact to living their life not scared of anything anymore(for Lucy, ghosts, and for Ethan, the sun). They go to the quarry one night not knowing the next morning that they are blasting at the quarry. Ross and Meredith find them and go to rescue them but then everything starts blowing up. Ross gets the kids to safety but a rock has pinned Meredith so he goes back for her and sees a stick of dynamite so he picks it up and tries to run away from her to save her. The stick blows up in his hand though and when the paramedics, Shelby, and Eli get there they've pronounced Ross dead.The book then goes to sort of a limbo area where Ross is with Aimee right before the car accident. When the car accident happens he goes to the other car like he did the first time and the girl he saves in Meredith. It then goes to the scene where Ross is on a stretcher and he wakes up on the way down to the morgue. Everyone ends up okay in the end!


At the end, there's an author's note about the Vermont Eugenics Project. It was a real historical event that at the time the book was written,2002, they were just coming across the records of this event happening. Vermont was one of 33 states that enacted a sterilization law. She also found that during the war crimes trials after WWII, Nazi scientists citied American eugenics programs as the foundation for their own plans for "racial hygiene". I think it's amazing that I never read about this is in my history classes. How did this happen and no one speaks or knows about it for 70 years? Also Jodi Picoult always does research about what she writes about whether its fiction or nonfiction. So for this book she went ghost hunting with TAPS( The Atlantic Paranormal Society) to get a point of view from someone like Ross, who truely believes in ghosts.

Blog #2

I've read up to p 192 now and the book has taken a turn for the worst. The book has 3 different parts, the first part was setting the scene of the book. We meet the characters and find out that Ross Wakeman, the main character, has met a ghost named Lia. He didnt know that she was a ghost though because he could hold her hand and kiss her. He finds out she's dead by tripping over her gravestone.
The second part is when it gets weird because it goes back to 1932 to the time when Lia was still alive. She was also 6 months pregnant. We find out that her husband is into eugenics and is trying to rid the "feebleminded" of their right to procreate. He's working on a sterilization law to sterilize all the gypsys, aka Abenaki Indians. Lia finds out that her real father is a gypsy and she starts to spend time with him. Throughout part 2 Lia tries to kill herself many times because she knows her husband doesnt love her for herself but because she's Henry Perkins daughter, a famous scientist working in eugenics too.
It's a really odd book. I really hated part 2 because it was so stupid. I dont want to read about someone trying to kill themselves every other day.. it gets old. Right now its back to present day and their trying to figure out who really killed Lia and her baby. The police report says that her baby was born a stillborn but in part 2 Lia finds her baby in the icehouse so her husband killed the baby because it looked like a gypsy. He's a really weird man.
I would like the book a lot more if part 2 wasn't so repetitive and annoying.

Class Time Today

soooo I'm reading Second Glance by Jodi Picoult. I've read about 60 pages and so far the main character... I forgot his name.. but his wife Aimee died in a car accident. He tries to stay "in contact" with her through paranormal work. He then quits his job because his boss lies to a client about a ghost in their house. He moves to his sister's home where her son has a condition where he is allergic to sunlight so he takes her son to an overnight job at a local house.

So far the book is really good and the paranormal aspect is cool because it ties in his passion for his wife because he tries so hard to contact her and find out if she's okay. It's beautiful.