The Story Teller takes place around the baking of fine, hotly buttered, mouth watering, scrumptious, multi-flavored, recognizable bread! Brioche, challah, "babka, poppy seed cake and mazurek."
Jodi Picoult pulls the reader into a struggle with life and death, and with the human effort to understand how we end. She takes this human and personal path to lead us into the painful puzzle of good and evil, of man and woman's inhumanity to others. And, yet in the midst of the readers own horror at our inhumane possibilities one finds oneself one of those "humans" as the senses react - as the reader's visual memories are activated and the smell of good hot bread ignites that hunger in the midst of the same memory that smells of spilt human blood.
The reader is jarred into seeing his or her own possibilities. The reader is made to contemplate the temptation to feel superior, the temptation to belong, and the temptation to use pain to inflict pain. Juxtaposed against these human conditions one sees, feels, and smells the horrific consequences of following the status quo, and the animal that emerges when one falls into that trap.
Picoult uses the main character to take the reader on an emotional human ride. It is a ride full of pain, friendship, and understanding. Just as the reader comes to believe that Sage, the main character, will always feel the pain of her scars, she finds love.
The Story Teller is about crime and punishment; it is about soul searching; it asks ancient, present, and future questions. It asks us to ask ourselves what lies ahead!
It is about the Holocaust.
Picoult is a sensitive and artful writer. She uses metaphors and similes to help the reader digest horror. As you read, you understand, that the bread metaphor works like a mother's hot soup on a day heavy with storms.
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