Book Review: Vanishing Acts, by Jodi Picoult

Delia Hopkins has a great life. She has a wonderful daughter and a terrific fiance. She has a great career, helping police departments track down missing persons with her search and rescue bloodhound, Greta. But her life is shattered in an instant when her father is arrested for kidnapping her when she was only four.

Delia's father had told her that her mother was dead. Delia has no memory of her mother or of being Bethany Mathews, which was her name before she was kidnapped. She has no memory of visiting a Harlem crack house in the dead of night with her father, Andrew, to get new identities, those of a father and daughter killed in a car crash.

Andrew is extradited to Arizona, where they had lived before he kidnapped Delia. Delia's lawyer fiance, Eric, associates with an Arizona attorney and takes on the job of defending Andrew against the kidnapping charges. Fitz, a journalist and the best friend of both Eric and Delia since childhood, follows them all to Arizona, ostensibly to write a story, but really due to his deep and enduring feelings for Delia.

Delia meets her mother, Elise, for the first time since age four. She demands that her father tell her why he deprived her of her mother for all these years. When she learns the truth, she realizes that her idealized image of her mother never existed.

The book, as with all of Picoult's books, alternates between different points of view--Delia's, Eric's, Fitz's, Andrew's, and Elise's. Delia tries to cope with the fact that her whole life has been turned upside down. Andrew's defense takes its toll on Eric, an alcoholic who starts drinking again. Fitz tries to help Delia and has a harder and harder time dealing with his feelings for her. Andrew copes with life in prison as a 60-year-old first-time offender. Elise recalls the past--the baby she lost after Delia, her feelings that Delia's father could not love her as she loved him, and her downward spiral. With the alternating viewpoints, everyone tells their own story and you see how they might end up making choices that most of us would think were the wrong thing to do. Even if you still don't agree with the choices they made, you can see how they might have made them. The message here is that there are no moral absolutes.