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.