When a developer buys a farm in rural Vermont, weird things start to happen in the tiny town of Comtosook: Rose petals rain from a clear sky; soil freezes in the middle of summer; coffee machines pour lemonade. Rumours circulate that the farm is haunted by ghosts from a native American burial ground of the Abenaki tribe. The developer hires ghost hunter Ross Wakeman, who got into the spectral search business to seek his dead fiancée Aimee. At the farm, Ross meets a mysterious young lady named Cecelia who wins his heart. When Ross discovers Cecilia’s gravestone, the story invokes a mystery that started 70 years earlier when Vermont was a hotbed of activity for a Eugenics project that provided a template for Hitler’s racial purity program.

Title

Second Glance

Author

Jodi Piccoult

Year

2003

Publisher

Washington Square Press.

Reading date

February 2008

Genre

Supernatural romance

Plot

When a developer buys a farm in rural Vermont, weird things start to happen in the tiny town of Comtosook: Rose petals rain from a clear sky; soil freezes in the middle of summer; coffee machines pour lemonade. Rumours circulate that the farm is haunted by ghosts from a native American burial ground of the Abenaki tribe. The developer hires ghost hunter Ross Wakeman, who got into the spectral search business to seek his dead fiancée Aimee. At the farm, Ross meets a mysterious young lady named Cecelia who wins his heart. When Ross discovers Cecilia’s gravestone, the story invokes a mystery that started 70 years earlier when Vermont was a hotbed of activity for a Eugenics project that provided a template for Hitler’s racial purity program.

Characters

Jodi Piccoult has packed Second Glance with characters. As well as Wakeman and the dodgy developer Rod Hook, there’s Abenaki elder Az Thompson; Ross’s sister Shelly and her son Ethan, who is allergic to sunlight; sensitive local cop Eli Rochert, genetic scientist Dr. Meredith Oliver and her sensitive daughter Lucy, and Spencer Pike, a tormented old man in a nursing home.  Piccoult introduces them by jumping between multiple narratives, much the way a movie sets up dramatic trains on a collision course. This unnecessarily complex structure is both frustrating and creates my core problem with the book: From the beginning, the central character of Ross Wakeman is neither likeable nor engaging: His endless reflections are self-indulgently adolescent which undermines the central tenet of the novel: The romance between Ross and Cecilia. Because I found Ross uninteresting, I did not care about his romantic follies.

Resolution

Everyone ends up happy. It turns out that Cecelia is the ghost of Spencer Pike’s dead wife who hanged herself when she believed that Pike had murdered their child because it looked “too Indian”. Cecelia, it transpires, was the daughter of premarital affair between her mother and a native American man, who is revealed as Az Thompson. However, the child was smuggled away by the Pike’s housemaid who raised it as her own daughter and who eventually had her own daughter, Meredith Oliver, who becomes a substitute for Ross’ infatuation with the spectral Cecilia.

Theme

Second Glance challenges the uncritical acceptance of science by unearthing details of Vermont’s 1920s “research” into Eugenics, the monitoring and enforced management of human fertility to produce socially desirable outcomes. It contrasts this so-called “science”– and its implied contemporary equivalent, genetic science – with the scientifically disregarded practice of the supernatural, which is the novel is the mechanism that delivers true justice.

Recommendation

I persisted reading Second Glance because it was recommended by the woman I love, but I found it a frustrating experience. The romance lacked combustion, the mystery was obvious, the social commentary was shallow and the combination of all these elements was contrived. For me, Second Glance is not worth a second thought.

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