Exercise: Critiquing Fiction

For the next class I have to critique a work of fiction that I have read. The title of the book is 'Songs of the Humpback Whale' by Jodi Picoult.


I like 'Songs of the Humpback Whale' a lot. It kept my attention fully. I think the target audience for this story is mainly adult women, I can't put the finger on why that is, but I do know that my partner doesn't like 'this kind of books' at all.

Jodi Picoult successfully creates tension. I kept reading and reading. I tried to read as slowly as possible, to enjoy the book for longer, but that was really hard.

The main character is Jane, and the whole book is used to get to know her better and to understand why she is who she has become and who she really is as a person. This character Jane and her relationship with her husband and daughter is unraveled like an onion.

The book reads like a road movie, with the main characters Jane and her daughter driving away from her husband in A, crossing the USA to B, with in the middle all sorts of chance events that bring Jane and her daughter closer together and further apart at the same time.


The story is told through the point of view of the main characters in the story: Jane, Oliver (the husband), and Rebecca (the daughter). The reader experiences the story through their individual eyes, which in my opinion creates a lot of tension, as you get to know their experiences and emotions first hand. There is also a character whose letters to Jane we get to see. The story jumps forward and backward through time.

I don't think the plot is always believable, here and there it's too dramatic. Especially at the end where the boyfriend of Rebecca (the daughter) falls from a cliff and dies - that could have gone a bit different and probably be better believable.

Jodi Picoult's strength for me lies in creating a certain mood throughout the story, which makes the state of the relationships between the main characters very clear. She is very good at sensory description, allowing the reader to feel what the characters feel. The dialogues are sharp, short and clean, which move the story forward, and make you want to read faster and more.