Ruth
"I don't want her or anyone who looks like her touching my son," the father interrupts, and he folds his arms across his chest. He's pushed up his sleeves while I was out of the room. Running from wrist to elbow on one arm is the tattoo of a Confederate flag.
Marie stops talking.
For a moment, I honestly don't understand.
And then it hits me with the force of a blow: they don't have a problem with what I've done.
Just with who I am.
I'm a huge fan of Jodi Picoult's books, so when I saw that Small Great Things, her newest, was available on NetGalley in late May/early June, I was thrilled. I read it and later finished it while on vacation, and I'm excited to now share this book with you.
Official synopsis:
A woman and her husband admitted to a hospital to have a baby requests that their nurse be reassigned - they are white supremacists and don't want Ruth, who is black, to touch their baby. The hospital complies, but the baby later goes into cardiac distress when Ruth is on duty. She hesitates before rushing in to perform CPR. When her indecision ends in tragedy, Ruth finds herself on trial, represented by a white public defender who warns against bringing race into a courtroom. As the two come to develop a truer understanding of each other's lives, they begin to doubt the beliefs they each hold most dear.
I'll be honest and say this book was hard to get through, because Picoult really gets into the minds of her characters, and writes in first-person. Some of the chapters were from the POV of Ruth, the African-American nurse who Turk, the white supremacist, and his wife Brittany were suing. The other chapters were from Kennedy, the public defender who was representing Ruth at trial, and the third POV chapters (the hardest to read) were that of Turk's, the white supremacist who has a Confederate flag tattoo.
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