The Book of Two Ways
Some you win …
Ahah, just when I’d got back together with Jodi Picoult and her clever novel, Mad Honey (reviewed in a post three weeks ago), the balloon bursts again. Big time.
I ordered another of her books with high hopes, and settled down to a good read. But alas, t’was not to be. No matter how fast I knitted, no matter how much I applied my mind! Reminded me yet again that each book has to stand alone, and just because I’m entranced by one doesn’t mean I’ll love everything by that author.
The Book of Two Ways tells the story of Dawn McDowell/Edelstein at two points in her life. The first is a young Dawn, a post grad Egyptologist working amongst the tombs of the Pharaohs and rulers, falling in love with an English earl in the dirt of the necropolis. The second, fifteen years later, is Dawn when she’s a mother and death doulah, accompanying clients on their last journey on earth, briefly returning to the site of the Egyptian excavations, reconnecting with the man who stole her heart.
As ever the author has done a phenomenal amount of research and background work. She’s even included hieroglyphs and ancient drawings in the book – how, I’ve no idea! But in spite of my admiration for her diligence, I struggled. 
I found the main character annoyingly hypocritical and dysfunctional. To my mind there was way, way too much technical detail about quantum physics and ancient Egypt and its languages and customs, for the purposes of a novel. Though I’m certainly particularly interested in terminal care and its management, I found the detail even here excessive and off-putting. I had to take frequent breaks and steel myself to persist to the end. As so often with Picoult, the psychological musings and insights didn’t fit with my own experience of ordinary people and how they think. And finally we don’t get to know Dawn’s decision about the two men in her life … ever! The very thread that kept me reading the last seventy pages!! The balloon I mentioned at the beginning deflated with an annoying splutter.
Shame. I wanted to get lost in it, but couldn’t.