Product Description

Fourteen-year-old Trixie Stone is in love for the first time. She's also the light of her father, Daniel's life -- a straight-A student; a pretty, popular freshman in high school; a girl who's always seen her father as a hero. That is, until her world is turned upside down with a single act of violence. Suddenly everything Trixie has believed about her family -- and herself -- seems to be a lie. Could the boyfriend who once made Trixie wild with happiness have been the one to end her childhood forever? She says that he is, and that is all it takes to make Daniel, a seemingly mild-mannered comic book artist with a secret tumultuous past he has hidden even from his family, venture to hell and back to protect his daughter.

With The Tenth Circle, Jodi Picoult offers her most powerful chronicle yet as she explores the unbreakable bond between parent and child, and questions whether you can reinvent yourself in the course of a lifetime -- or if your mistakes are carried forever.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1565 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-24
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.com
Bestselling author Jodi Picoult's The Tenth Circle is a metaphorical journey through Dante's Inferno, told through the eyes of a small Maine family whose hidden demons haunt every aspect of their seemingly peaceful existence. Woven throughout the novel are a series of dramatic illustrations that pay homage to the family's patriarch (comic book artist Daniel Stone), and add a unique twist to this gripping, yet somewhat rhetorical tale.

Trixie Stone is an imaginative, perceptive 14 year old whose life begins to unravel when Jason Underhill, Bethel High's star hockey player, breaks up with her, leaving a void that can only be filled by the blood spilled during shameful self-mutilations in the girls' bathroom. While Trixie's dad Daniel notices his daughter's recent change in demeanor, he turns a blind eye, just as he does to the obvious affair his wife Laura, a college professor, is barely trying to conceal. When Trixie gets raped at a friend's party, Daniel and Laura are forced to deal not only with the consequences of their daughter's physical and emotional trauma, but with their own transgressions as well. For Daniel, that means reflecting on a childhood spent as the only white kid in a native Alaskan village, where isolation and loneliness turned him into a recluse, only to be born again after falling in love with his wife. Laura, who blames her family's unraveling on her selfish affair, must decide how to reconcile her personal desires with her loved ones' needs.

The Tenth Circle is chock full of symbolism and allegory that at times can seem oppresive. Still, Picoult's fans will welcome this skillfully told story of betrayal and its many negative, and positive consequences. --Gisele Toueg

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Some of Picoult's best storytelling distinguishes her twisting, metaphor-rich 13th novel (after Vanishing Acts) about parental vigilance gone haywire, inner demons and the emotional risks of relationships. Comic book artist Daniel Stone is like the character in his graphic novel with the same title as this book—once a violent youth and the only white boy in an Alaskan Inuit village, now a loving, stay-at-home dad in Bethel, Maine—traveling figuratively through Dante's circles of hell to save his 14-year-old teenage daughter, Trixie. After she accuses her ex-boyfriend of rape, Trixie—and Daniel, whose fierce father-love morphs to murderous rage toward her assailant—unravel in the aftermath of the allegation. At the same time, wife and mother Laura, a Dante scholar, tries to mend her and Daniel's marriage after ending her affair with one of her students. Picoult has collaborated with graphic artist Dustin Weaver to illustrate her deft, complex exploration of Daniel and his beast within, but the drawings, though well-done, distract from the powerful picture she has drawn with words. Laura and Daniel follow their runaway daughter to Alaska, at which point Picoult drives the story with the heavy-handed Dante metaphor—not the characters. Still, this story of a flawed family on the brink of destruction grips from start to finish.
Copyright Ã,© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Drivers crossing the Maine border are greeted by a sign proclaiming "Maine: The Way Life Should Be." Readers approaching the same territory in Jodi Picoult's new novel, The Tenth Circle, should be warned "Maine: The Way Life Really Is."

Picoult, whose 12 previous books include the bestsellers Vanishing Acts and My Sister's Keeper, spins fast-paced tales of family dysfunction, betrayal and redemption, often set in northern New England (she lives in New Hampshire). The Tenth Circle, a grimly entertaining if overplotted tale of a Bethel, Maine, family blasted apart by the teenage daughter's date rape, hews closely to the concerns of Picoult's earlier work.

Fourteen-year-old Trixie is the much-loved only child of Daniel and Laura Stone. Daniel is an artist for Marvel Comics. Laura is a prominent Dante scholar at (fictional) Monroe College. They seem like one of those mismatched couples whose marriage triumphantly defies the odds -- Laura the straitlaced scholar, Daniel the former Alaskan wild man who cleaned up to become a full-time father once Trixie was born.

And Trixie? Bright, loving, sensitive Trixie is the dream child who, overnight, becomes every parent's nightmare. At the beginning of her freshman year, she has a prized older boyfriend -- Jason, a high school hockey champion. But when The Tenth Circle opens, Jason has just broken up with her. Not altogether unkindly, as it turns out, but the split devastates Trixie. Weeks afterward, still reeling from the rejection, Trixie rushes from her psych class to vomit in the girls' bathroom. She begins cutting herself, first with a broken mirror and then with her father's razor.

Parents of teenage children will shudder at how her best friend Zephyr tries to cheer her up: She hosts a party while her mother is out of town, complete with alcohol, drugs and sex games. Picoult's depiction of these rites of contemporary adolescence is exceptional: unflinching, unjudgmental, utterly chilling. Jason is at the party, too. After most of the other guests have left, they begin a game of strip poker. Trixie, desperate to win him back, seems happy to play along, until things go too far, and Jason rapes her.

This event and its immediate aftermath are the most powerful parts of the novel. As Picoult notes, one in six American women will be the victim of a rape or attempted rape during her lifetime. Those who have survived a sexual assault will recognize Trixie's subsequent dissociation, the cold horror of the emergency room and police interview, the sense of a life being irrevocably broken, as well as the rage and guilt of Trixie's parents. Trixie accuses Jason of rape, but when her name is leaked to local media, she's ostracized and tormented by her schoolmates, who accuse her of having been a willing participant.

If Picoult had retained this tight focus on Trixie's experience, The Tenth Circle might have had the power of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones or Rosellen Brown's Before And After. Instead, the novel veers off into an increasingly implausible chain of events. Jason plunges from a bridge, but did he fall or was he pushed? Trixie is under suspicion; so is her father. Trixie runs away, to the same remote village in Alaska where her father grew up, and her desperate parents follow.

Two of Picoult's books have been adapted for Lifetime Channel movies. In its latter pages, The Tenth Circle seems to have been written with one (or both) eyes on the TV screen. The book becomes mired in whimsical, fleeting, TV-ready moments -- the police detective's potbellied pig; a description of Sorrow Soup; Trixie's hiding in a truck loaded with cattle; and her melancholy pre-Christmas visit to Santa's Village, en route to Alaska. And for a reader in a post-9/11 world, it defies belief that a 14-year-old girl could fly cross-country without benefit of a photo ID.

Illustrated pages (by artist Dustin Weaver) are interspersed throughout The Tenth Circle to show Daniel's work on the graphic novel that gives the novel its name, a too-neat takeoff on Dante's Circles of Hell. But the pictures seem intrusive, a blatant attempt to cash in on the current graphic novel craze. (And if that's not enough, there's also a secret message hidden in the illustrated pages.) Still, Picoult manages some touching scenes near the end, when Trixie is befriended by a Yup'ik boy her own age. One wishes Picoult had trusted her considerable gifts for understatement and wry humor, as when Zephyr and Trixie discuss the possibility of an afterlife:

" 'I wonder if it's like it is here. If there are popular dead people and geeky dead people. You know.' That sounded like high school, and the way Trixie figured it, that was more likely to be hell."

This sounds like the real thing, and not mere wistful longing for The Way Life Should Be.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Not my favorite, but still worth reading
I've been a big fan of Picoult's for several years now, since I read Keeping Faith. Since then I've counted her among my favorite authors and enjoyed book after book, especially The Pact and My Sister's Keeper.

One thing I love about her books is that they are always so well-researched and run the gamut from light-hearted to gut-wrenching. There aren't many authors who so consistently keep me awake after a long day at work because I *have* to finish the chapter before I can go to sleep. And usually, one chapter turns into 2 and well, there have been a lot of groggy mornings due to Picoult!

Usually it takes me about a week to finish one of Picoult's novels. The Tenth Circle was an exception. It was over a year before I finally managed to get through ~400 pages. It was really only the first few chapters that seemed to drag on and on, but with such long chapters it seemed brutal. Once it started to pick up, I ended up enjoying it, and as always it seemed to end too quickly, but it definitely took awhile to get into.

I'm admittedly not a comic fan, which may have hampered my enjoyment. I am a fan of Dante's Inferno, so I did appreciate that tie-in and all of it's elements. This just seemed really different from her other works that I've enjoyed and I think it's one of the only ones so far that I'm not likely to pick up and re-read (I've read The Pact 3x).

I did enjoy the puzzle, that was certainly a treat!

Not one of my favorites by Picoult
THE TENTH CIRCLE by Jodi Picoult
July 22, 2008

Amazon Rating: 3/5 stars

THE TENTH CIRCLE has two main stories embedded in one. The main story is the one that follows the daughter, and the prologue involves Trixie getting lost as a toddler and her father freaking out, worried that she may have been kidnapped. This scene misled me to think the story would have a kidnapping scenario, but it didn't. It is hinted that this one experience maimed Trixie for life, and hurt her psychologically. From the story and the choices she made, yes, she had a lot of psychological problems, but they were never dealt with at any point - there are scenes where she gets into self mutilation. But at the same time, after reading the entire book, I feel that this intro with Trixie getting lost did not really connect with the rest of the book. I totally forgot it even happened, until I started writing this review.

Trixie, in the main body of the book, is a teenager who is having peer pressure issues. She just lost a boyfriend who was considered THE guy to be with, and because she had been dating him, she had been included with the "in group". Without him, she was considered one of the geeks, the outcasts. Upon the breakup, Trixie falls apart and is desperate. She cannot live without Jason. It's at a party that Trixie and her best friend decide that Trixie needs to make Jason jealous, and in a drunken state Trixie flirts and makes out with various guys at the party, and eventually ends up at a strip poker game with just four of them. It is just she and Jason, and his best friend Moss and her best friend Zephyr. It doesn't end on a good note. It's this event after the poker game that changes everything. This one single act changes the lives of many people, and is so devastating that it ends in tragedy.

The other story is that of Daniel and Laura Stone (Trixie's parents) marriage, their histories, and Laura's affair. In the midst of it all, Daniel is writing a comic strip based on his life and mirrors his need to protect his daughter. Daniel has a secret past, one that his family does not know. He's run away from it, a past that started with his childhood in Alaska. He's a changed person from what he was back then, but Trixie's problems with her boyfriend Jason will bring it all back.

While I'm giving this book a 3 star rating, it was not one of my favorites by Jodi Picoult. While I felt it was rather unique to intersperse the comics with each chapter, I felt they were distracting and they broke the mood of the main story. I get it that the father was a comic book artist, and I also got that the story in the book paralleled the comic book hero's story, but I still feel somewhat that this was unnecessary. On the other hand, it did make this a unique reading experience, and it's a book I won't forget. I'll always remember THE TENTH CIRCLE as the book with the super hero comic strip.

In terms of the story line - I am not sure what to think. I didn't like any of the characters, meaning I had no sympathy with any one of them: not the mom, who was having a secret life on the side, not the daughter who was living a life that her parents didn't know about, not the father who had a checkered past. Now, I never give a bad rating just because I don't like the characters. I attribute the creation of unlikable characters to good writing and realistic characters that I just happen to not care for. If I met them on the street, they wouldn't be my friends. I can't relate to them or the choices they made. I am not condemning any of the characters either, for what they did. But something about them I just didn't connect with.

One of the problems I had with the story line was the last section of the book that took us to Alaska. Yes, I get that Daniel was from Alaska, but I found that moving the story line to Alaska turned the book into am almost epic story, which I felt was unnecessary. The book was already on a grand scale close to being a soap opera, and I felt that this change in location broke the mood of the story. I would have liked it better if things were resolved in a courtroom, but as readers will find out, this doesn't happen for reasons I won't disclose.

3 stars isn't a bad rating, but I've always given her books a 4. THE TENTH CIRCLE is definitely not one of my favorite Jodi Picoult stories, but at the same time, it still kept my interest and it didn't' take me long to finish it.

A Thoughtprovoking Novel...
I recently discovered this gem of a Picoult book and I'm surprised at some of the negative reviews I see written by others. I found this novel refreshing in it's combination of the written story and the parallel graphic novel elements. After I read the book, I actually went back and studied the graphic parts as there's so much happening in them. I won't give away the plot, but Picoult writes about contemporary issues facing many families today, especially those with teens. I found this was very interesting and each part made me want to read more. I loved the incorporation of Dante's Circles of Hell, so that intrigued me as well. I can see where some might find parts over the top, or unbelievable, but I wasn't looking for a documentary. I think this argument could be said about any of Picoult's books. I wanted an entertaining story that made me think and this one did exactly that. I'm still discussing this one with others that have read it. Since I have a teenager at home, this book also opened up some serious discusssions with my daughter. I don't know what higher compliment I can give the book than that.