Book #82: Salem Falls

Title: Salem Falls
Author: Jodi Picoult

I wasted most of this weekend reading Salem Falls, the story of Jack, a high school history teacher who tries to start his life again after being wrongly accused of sexual assault, only to have the whole thing happen again in the new town. It was an easy read, an engrossing story, but there were parts of the story that drove me crazy. For one thing-- the dates were constantly off. For example, Jack's love interest Addie had a daughter who died some time in the past. At one point, they said she'd died ten years earlier, at another point, they said it was eleven years earlier, and another time they said it was eight years earlier. It might not seem like that big a deal, but it mattered to me, because it was the only way for me to gauge how old Addie was, since I knew that she was twenty-seven when her daughter died (or was she?). At the end of the book, they talk about how Jack went to jail in the summer of 1998, but the book takes place in 2000, and he was in jail for eight months, so he obviously went to jail in 1999. It's stuff like that that drove me nuts. Furthermore, while the story kept me reading, it felt like literary McDonalds. Not really good, not at all mind-expanding, but it somehow kept me coming back for more. It definitely cemented my opinion that Jodi Picoult is the female gender's John Grisham.