small great things
Championship: "Small Nifty Things"
Author: Jodi Picoult
State: USA
Pages: 480
Yr published: 2016
My rating: ★★★★☆

Not beingness a Picoult fan, I found information technology astonishing that I liked this book so much. I only readMy Sister'south Keeper, which I thought was adept, merely annihilation else I couldn't go past the outset 50 pages or and then. WithSmall Great Things, I was hooked, and then I recommend it even if you lot don't regularly come across you reading Picoult.

Some would say that Small Nifty Thingsis a terrific volume because of its theme: an African-American maternity nurse fighting the system when she gets discriminated against by a white supremacist couple. The volume addresses white privilege, justice, and prejudice while keeping the story human and managing to avoid existence over-dramatic. What I liked most is the manner Picoult managed to contain the narrative while pushing boundaries that are inherent in such an uncomfortable subject. She is a gifted storyteller and somehow manages to practise justice to the bailiwick brilliantly, even though at the stop of the mean solar day, I'm not certain this is something a white author can capture in its entirety.

Ruth Jefferson is a middle-aged African-American nurse and the single mom of a teenager, who one mean solar day finds herself in an impossible state of affairs at work. A white supremacist couple demands that no black nurse is to bear on their baby, but when the little one goes into cardiac arrest and Ruth is the only one there, she is torn betwixt ignoring the society and upholding her oath. When the baby dies, Ruth goes on trial for murder.

The book is initially written in the voice of Ruth, but readers soon find out that in that location are in fact three narrators: Ruth, Kennedy McQuarrie, the white lawyer that defends her, and the father of the infant, Turk Bauer, a white supremacist effigy covered in swastika tattoos and hurling racial slurs all twenty-four hours long.

As the narrative develops, I noticed how Kennedy's voice is perhaps the loudest one in the volume. Her graphic symbol begins every bit that of an educated woman who claims that she "doesn't see colour", and ends equally someone who realizes that being racist is a more complex problem than one's opinion on equal rights. As such, the book doesn't seem to focus on Ruth and her story, but generally on the manner white individuals who believe that "they don't have a racist bone in them" actually feel about race and privilege.

"Active racism is telling a nurse supervisor that an African American nurse can't bear upon your babe. It'southward snickering at a blackness joke. But passive racism? Information technology's noticing there'southward only one person of colour in your office and not request your boss why. It's reading your kid'southward fourth-grade curriculum and seeing that the but black history covered is slavery, and not questioning why. It'due south defending a woman in court whose indictment directly resulted from her race…and glossing over that fact, similar it hardly matters."

I liked that Picoult doesn't seem to have written the book every bit a dramatic account of how existence racist is morally incorrect. Instead, she manages to force her readers, presumably lots of white people, look at themselves. She doesn't claim that she understands the struggle of being a black woman, simply does a proficient job at making people understand that it's not alright to sit down idly and allow things such every bit this happen, simply because white people don't take to be scared they may be arrested because of the colour of their peel.

"What if the puzzle of the world was a shape you didn't fit into? And the merely way to survive was to mutilate yourself, carve away your corners, sand yourself downwards, change yourself to fit? How come up we haven't been able to alter the puzzle instead?"

Granted, this is a work of fiction, only information technology resonates profoundly with how white people experience virtually race, and that'south what makes information technology an important read. At one bespeak while preparing for trial, Ruth tells Kennedy:

"Y'all say you don't run into color…but that's all you lot come across. You're then hyperaware of it, and of trying to wait like yous aren't prejudiced, you can't even understand that when you say race doesn't matter all I hear is you dismissing what I've felt, what I've lived, what it's like to be put down because of the color of my skin."

This is perhaps the nigh accurate paragraph I institute in a volume describing a feeling and a situation whatsoever white person found themselves at to the lowest degree in one case in connexion to a non-white individual. Those who say "that'southward not me" or worse "oh, that'due south not me, I accept black friends" should definitely take a good look at themselves and think again.