Delia's world comes crashing down around her when her father is picked up by the police for abduction. She has no conscious memory of her previous life, but glimpses start to trickle through.
Each chapter is narrated by one of the characters, giving more information and feelings about the action.

As with My sister's keeper, nothing is black and white. People are complicated, the boundaries of right and wrong are blurred. ( )

(unabridged audiobook, multiple readers): Delia Hopkins has a pretty ordinary life in Wexton, New Hampshire, that gets turned upside down overnight when her father is arrested for having kidnapped her during a custody visit 28 years ago. The twisty plot and complex character relationships are revealed slowly and deliberately, hooking me from the first chapter. This is my second Picoult book, and like the other (My Sister's Keeper), it is told in a series of first-person narratives, including Delia, her father, her mother, her fiancee, and her best friend. Each character is read by a different person, all of whom were quite good with the exception of Delia, who was almost painful to listen to. Luckily, the story was good enough that I still got sucked in despite her awkward reading. If the two I've read are at all representative of quality, I will definitely be picking up more of Picoult's books in the future. ( )

I hate abandoning books half-way through, and, this year, there have only been two that I haven't finished. The first was 'Getting Rid of Matthew' by Jane Fallon (The less said about that the better.), and the other was 'Vanishing Acts' by Jodi Picoult. My mum is a Picoult fan, and about a year ago she gave me a stack of her books to read. Three days ago, I finally picked one up and started reading. I stopped reading at page 100, my cut off for books that haven't fully engaged me earlier on.

**CONTAINS SPOILERS***

It's not that this book is bad, it's just that it's annoying. I found the main character, Delia Hopkins, irritating, and, after 100 pages, I just didn't care about her or her story any more. The plot seemed contrived: Delia Hopkins has always been good at finding things, and, as an adult, she makes a living as a finder of lost children. Now what would be the most devastating thing for her to find out? That's right. That she, herself, was also lost (kidnapped) as a child. I could handle this idea, if it wasn't the crux of the whole book. This is something that might work if the story was about a case she was working on, and then she found out her own secret at the end, but it doesn't happen like that. She finds out in the first few chapters and then (I'm guessing here because I haven't read on.) the rest of the book is about her unravelling her own mystery. I don't think the reader is given enough time to get to know Delia as a person before she becomes a whiny, snivelling victim. The other thing that put me off was that the story is written from four different first person perspectives, which are hard to follow because each voice is not distinctive enough. Sometimes I forgot whose story I was reading. ( )

To be completly honest. I hated this novel. I'm really not impressed with it. I didn't like the story. ( )

I don’t know what I would do if I woke up one day to find out that my entire life had been a lie. What if I woke up to find out that the name that I had gone by for as long as I could remember, wasn’t my real name at all. This has never happened to me, but it is exactly what happened to Delia Hopkins, who believes that she was born and raised in New Hampshire by her single, widowed father. Part of her life was in fact a lie, told to her by her own father. She was actually born in Arizona and her mother is still alive. Her father kidnapped her, changed their names, and moved them as far away as possible for reasons Delia was only beginning to understand. Jodi Picoult weaves a beautiful story of self-discovering, family crisis, and how far love can take all of us. This book faces the reader with the fragile line between morally and legally right; which is something we all have to face.
Jodi Picoult is one of my favorite authors because of her ability to write compelling novels on controversy subjects. This story involving the moral decision of kidnapping your own child from a dangerous environment is counterbalanced with the fact that Delia herself has a young daughter about the age that she was when her father took her. Picoult writes with such vivid language and descriptions that when Delia felt betrayed by her father, so did I. And then when she had to face what she would have done in his place with her own daughter, I was right there with her. There is irony to the story that just turns your insides and makes you think about the people all around you and what their story’s could be. Delia’s job was search and rescue. Her job was to find missing people, when in fact she was a missing person herself. I get goose bumps just thinking of all the people out there who are missing or lost, especially the ones who don’t even know it.
My favorite books are the ones that make you feel something true. The ones that make you laugh and make you cry. I read this book and I laughed and cried, making this book one of my favorites. I also enjoyed the mystery and suspense of it all. Jodi Picoult has a way of writing intrigue with twists so that you could think that you have it all figured out; but your wrong. She always changes the ending from where the book is going, so that it end s up being like nothing you could have guessed. It’s thrilling and I love it. This book made me realize, that there are some things in life that you think you know, but you find out you don’t. And it doesn’t matter the most the reason why there was a lie in the first place. What matters the most is that you find out what the truth is at the moment, because only then can you live what you believe and what you know. ( )