You know what they say.

If you’ve read one Jodi Picoult book…

You’ve read em all.

Oh, they don’t say that?

If you’ve never read anything by Jodi Picoult, I’ll just give you the gist of all her novels.  MORAL DILEMMA.  To her credit, she weaves these morally complicated plots like a pro and her writing is both interesting and captivating, but because they all share the same core theme, there’s a degree of predictability that can be a little annoying.

The Storyteller intertwines several different (but not so mutually exclusive) storylines together.  There’s the story of Sage, a 20-something baker, semi-recluse and sole survivor of a car crash that involved she and her mother.  Then there’s the story of Reiner Hartmann, a former Nazi, who now goes by Josef and enlists Sage to SPOILER ALERT “help him die.”  Also incorporated into the book, is the tale of Sage’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor (and the plot thickens!) and periodic excerpts from a story she had written as a young girl.  Add in a love interest for Sage and you have yourself a recipe for a really chaotic novel.  And yet, it’s not.  Therein lies the appeal of Jodi Picoult.  Well for me, at least.

As the author of 18 novels, many of them bestsellers, Jodi Picoult obviously knows what she’s doing.  I just wish I didn’t also know what she was doing two chapters into the book 😛