Provocative questions raised in Picoult’s ‘Vanishing Acts’

A lemon tree in a dream that feels too real is the hook that begins to loosen the tidy seams of Delia Hopkins’ idyllic life in Jodi Picoult’s latest novel, “Vanishing Acts.”

Delia was raised in New Hampshire by her widowed father. A town councilman, senior citizens’ advocate and amateur magician, Andrew is a model citizen and the kind of parent other children desire as their own.

Now Delia, who does search and rescue for a living, is a parent herself and is engaged to her daughter’s father. Along with not having known her mother, the greatest pain of Delia’s life has been dealing with her fiance Eric’s alcoholism, from which he is recovering.

All that changes when police come knocking on her door to arrest her father for kidnapping – her kidnapping, 28 years earlier.

That lemon tree dream had led her best friend, Fitz, to do a little digging. He discovers that a girl, Bethany Matthews, had been kidnapped years ago in Arizona, and that at about the same time, another girl, Cordelia Hopkins, and her father had died in St. Louis. Delia doesn’t know who she is anymore.

Andrew is extradited to Arizona, where he must go on trial. Delia makes Eric, who is a lawyer, promise to get her father off. But in that hot desert sun, Delia must confront a forgotten past and a mother she barely remembers before forging a new future.

As in the bestselling “My Sister’s Keeper,” Picoult raises provocative questions that have no clear answers. In “Vanishing Acts,” she explores whether it is ever right for a parent to steal a child.

“In my shoes,” Andrew says, “how do you know you wouldn’t have done the same thing?”

Unfortunately, her examination of such a charged topic is bogged down by contrived coincidences, weighty subplots and the distracting gimmick of using a different font for each character narrating the story.

Among the irony is the “lost” daughter who does search and rescue for a living, and the kidnapper father who entertains with a magician’s disappearing act.

Perhaps the most deeply embedded subplot is the childhood friendship of Delia, Eric and Fitz that has grown into a twisted love triangle.

Though Delia and Eric have a daughter and are engaged, Fitz has never stopped pining for Delia. Each time Eric does something terrible, it is to Fitz that Delia runs. That pattern repeats itself in Arizona.

Then there is Andrew’s time in prison while he is on trial, which Picoult uses to examine society behind bars. She goes beyond humiliating strip searches and attempted rape to explore prison gangs, racial tensions and even setting up a meth operation. The deletion of much of this would not have harmed the narrative.

Throughout, Delia recovers more lost memories and discovers her mother could never be the one she had imagined. Beyond the lemon tree lie clues to a ruined life that may justify a reinvented one.