The Storyteller

The Storyteller
by Jodi Picoult

I stayed up until nearly 2 AM this morning to finish Jodi Picoult’s newest release The Storyteller.  It is just one of those books that I couldn’t put down.  As is typical of Picoult’s style, the book has several narrators.  The first is Sage Singer.  Sage is a baker.  She lives in the same small New Hampshire town where she grew up baking bread from family recipes that have been passed down through her Jewish ancestors for generations.  She feels all alone in the world since the death of her mother in a car accident that also left Sage’s face disfigured.  Working as a baker allows Sage to work at night where there is no one to see her face.  She attends a weekly grief group to deal with the death of her mother, and it is there that she strikes up an unlikely friendship with an 85 year-old-man named Josef who has recently lost his wife.  Josef is a well-known and well-loved figure in the town, where he taught German for many years and coached little league baseball.  Sage and Josef seem to identify with each other somehow, Sage with her scars and Josef with his grief.   But that all changes when Josef tells Sage that he is really a Nazi war criminal and that all these years he has passed as a good man.  And if that is not enough, he asks that Sage do him a favor.  He wants her to help him die.  Sage agrees only to listen to his story.  As she does, she realizes that as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor she can never forgive Josef and that he should pay for his crimes.  Sage contacts the FBI and speaks with Leo Stein, a persecutor with the office of Human Rights and Special Prosecutions.  Leo is a Nazi hunter.  He is also a Jew and a young man.  He agrees to meet Sage, and there is an undeniable attraction from the beginning on his part, at least.  But Leo has no way to confirm the story that Sage claims Josef told her. Sage believes that her grandmother, Minka, can confirm it if only she would tell her story.  All these years, Minka has never told her family the story of her survival, but Sage and Leo convince her to tell it now.    And it turns out that Minka is a great storyteller.  Not only does she tell the story of her survival, but she tells the story of how her storytelling saved her.  . . . The lives of these characters begin to intertwine:  Minka, Josef, Sage, Leo, and even the characters from Minka’s imagined stories are all interconnected and unforgettable.  And of course, the story includes a final, surprising plot twist that we have come to expect of Picoult.  This is a great book.  It is one I will be thinking about for many days. 

Genre:  Realistic Fiction, Historical Fiction

Reviewed by:  Lauren Sprouse (librarian)