Alice says that 98 percent of science is quantifiable, leaving 2 percent “that can’t be measured or explained. I adored the “past” events which focused primarily on the mother's post-doctoral study of elephant cognition. This young male had been ejected from the herd already -- he was in his teens - but his mother heard his distress and came running all the same. I've always been intrigued by psychics and that part mixed with the elephant stuff really made this one stick for me. In her most gripping mystery since House Rules, Jodi Picoult brings us a powerful story of a young girl's determination to uncover the truth, however shocking and life-changing it might be.

I don't know if I loved this book because I didn't see the end coming or I hated it because the end is something that has been done, over and over. But Tina died, and when she did, Sissy stayed with her – and then remained by her grave for a few days. Male elephants are chased from the herd at about age 13 by the matriarch, when they first come into musth, a state where they get very aggressive and want to mate. It is a wonderful story of love and respect, grief and loss plus the love between a mother and her child, be it elephant or human; the telling is shared between Jenna, Alice, Serenity and Virgil. This very moving and poignant story is full of mystery and intrigue, but the twist at the end of the book blew me away!With plenty of twists and a surprising ending, [Leaving Time] explores the grieving process and what happens when we cannot move on. Three-year-old Jenna is led out to the sanctuary grounds by her babysitter Nevvie, who smashes Jenna over the head with a rock in revenge for her daughter's death.

I knew that giraffes had four stomachs and that the leg muscles of a locust were 1000 times more powerful than the same weight of human muscle. The third perspective is from Serenity, a washed up celebrity psychic who is drawn to Jenna through feelings of guilt over a failure in her powers at the height of her fame. Because of all that remains unspoken, she hurts, like any child would, and desperately wants to get all the answers behind her mother’s abandonment.

The Sanctuary was where Jenna had been born, where her mother and father Thomas Metcalf worked together, caring for their beloved elephants, and learning of the close familial bond which elephant families share. Virgil grapples with helping Jenna when he suspects discovering the truth might be more painful to her than never knowing.

In 1979, after the demise of Forest Park’s resident polar bear, the facility closed and Morganetta was moved to the Los Angeles Zoo. My major problem with the book is that the two story lines aren't integrated well at all, and they read like two very different books with only the link between Alice and Jenna tying them together. Maybe I would have tried to memorize the smell of bug spray on my mother’s skin, or the way she absent-mindedly braided my hair, tying it off on the end with a stalk of green grass.As Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish. On the night of July 16, 2004 tragedy strikes the sanctuary and Alice is taken by ambulance unconscious to Mercy United Hospital in Boone Heights. I was thinking a lot of how we humans raise our kids to be self sufficient enough to leave us – and how depressing it was for those who were left behind.