**Lone Wolf
**Jodi Picoult – Allen & Unwin
It’s been 16 years since Jodi Picoult hit on the winning formula that made her a bestselling author. She’s got it down to a fine art – she picks a controversial topic, adds a court case, lots of detailed research, tells the story from the points of view of many characters, throws in a few twists and before you know it she has another hit on her hands.
In her latest book, her main character is, unusually for her, a pretty extraordinary person. After living for two years with a pack of wolves, Luke Warren has found worldwide fame as a wolf expert. He left behind his wife Georgie, son Edward (24) and daughter Cara to become a member of a new lupine family and found it hard to slot back into the real world once his adventure was over.
Now divorced from Georgie and estranged from Edward, Luke is only close to 17-year-old Cara. When collecting Cara from a drunken teenage party, there’s a terrible accident that leaves him in a coma. Doctors say he won’t recover and the family needs to decide whether to turn off his life support.
Because she’s not yet 18 Cara is too young to make the call, however Edward can. The trouble is Edward and Cara can’t agree on what to do. Edward plans to pull the plug because he thinks it’s what Luke would want. Cara thinks her dad should be kept alive at all costs in case there’s a chance he could recover, and goes to court in a bid to stop Edward terminating Luke’s life.
The story is told from the point of view of several characters, including Edward, Cara and Georgie. But the voice that is the strongest is Luke’s. His experiences of living with wolves are fascinating and written in incredibly vivid detail.
While predictable in parts and lacking the intensity of some of Jodi’s previous books, it’s still a riveting read and deeply moving. It provokes the reader into thinking about what they would do if faced with a similar predicament.
