Book Review : Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

Genre : Fiction,Contemporary
Page : 480 pages
Published : 11th October 2016

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Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years’ experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she’s been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don’t want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders or does she intervene?

Ruth hesitates before performing CPR and, as a result, is charged with a serious crime. Kennedy McQuarrie, a white public defender, takes her case but gives unexpected advice: Kennedy insists that mentioning race in the courtroom is not a winning strategy. Conflicted by Kennedy’s counsel, Ruth tries to keep life as normal as possible for her family—especially her teenage son—as the case becomes a media sensation. As the trial moves forward, Ruth and Kennedy must gain each other’s trust, and come to see that what they’ve been taught their whole lives about others—and themselves—might be wrong.

With incredible empathy, intelligence, and candor, Jodi Picoult tackles race, privilege, prejudice, justice, and compassion—and doesn’t offer easy answers. Small Great Things is a remarkable achievement from a writer at the top of her game.

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“If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.” 

I gotta say this book is beautiful. This book talks about many things that happened to this world. This book talks about racism, the different treatment received by the victims in almost everyday and how do they manage to live with that, the people who try to defend the victims and so much more. The author manage to bring all of these difficult element into her book and made it a heartfelt story.

This book depict a beautiful story of an innocent African-America nurse who was wrongly blamed by the things she didn’t do and most importantly because of her dark skin tone. Even her colleagues whom she taught to be her friends for this whole time turns their back when this misjudgement happened to her and no one shows any sympathy to her. Instead, they made her as a scapegoat of the dead baby incident. It’s awful.

This book is actually based on a real life story that happened in Flint, Michigan. Inspired by the real life story, with astounding skills the author creates a story about society prejudice towards the blacks that might still be happening right now and the privileges of being white. This plot is quite touching and this book prepare a little twist for the readers. I believe it can made you bulged your eyes out. This book is so accurately depicted that some of the chapters might moved you to tears and I want to inform you that this book didn’t bore me at all. This book is a massive page turner. The story is so good and the flow is so well ordered although I sometimes got the feeling that nearing the end of the book the story is kinda rushed. Maybe you won’t feel the rushed chapters at all since the story is so well written but you might feel the rushed ending in the end. However, I’m still happy with how it ends.

The thing I love the most in this book is the message and the author courage in publishing this book. The author knows very well that some people will not accept this book but she still keep on going and try her best in the hope for helping the blacks to acquired some platform for themselves and encourage the white to settle things equally in the hope of all lives live and is going to be treated fairly without any judgement.

“It just goes to show you: every baby is born beautiful. It’s what we project on them that makes them ugly.”

Author : Celine