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A review by whitneydawnyt
Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult
5.0
I really enjoyed this book. I picked it up from Books a Million but ending up reading it on Overdrive or well listening to it.
It's about a labor and delivery nurse who is black and had the job for about 20 yrs. she lives in a nice neighborhood with her 17yr old son and her husband was a solider killed in Afghanistan. She goes to work and does her job. This was during a shift changed that she learned the reason why she was removed from a baby was because she was black and the parents were white supremacists. She seems a little mad but anyone would be in that case since in this book I believe the year is 2015 and we should be well past dealing with racist people. The baby ends up stops breathing and Ruth hesitates because she's not suppose to touch the baby. The baby named Davis ends up dying. The family goes to the cops and presses charges against her and only her.
She gets a white public defender and the prosecutor is black. Her public defender doesn't get why everything is so hard for Ruth until she goes shopping with her and see how the two women are treated differently.
Towards the end they get some surprising news that the baby could have a fatal disease that wasn't found due to the sample being sent off. The tests are done off site and it's the weekend so they don't get the results until after the baby died. Another surprising result comes when Ruth fires Kennedy as her lawyer. Kennedy is cleaning up all the paperwork when she sees a paper saying that the baby had sickle cell. Which is mainly only in African Americans. So, she calls the black activist and gives him the info to run with it.
On the final day of trial after closing arguments Brittany's mom shows up after all these years and no one knew she was black. Brit couldn't handle it and ran away. You get an update of everyone at the end of the book and it's really a powerful story of racism. Jodi is one of the best authors out there and she tackles these hard issues and makes a great book out of it.
Towards the end they get some surprising news that the baby could have a fatal disease that wasn't found due to the sample being sent off. The tests are done off site and it's the weekend so they don't get the results until after the baby died. Another surprising result comes when Ruth fires Kennedy as her lawyer. Kennedy is cleaning up all the paperwork when she sees a paper saying that the baby had sickle cell. Which is mainly only in African Americans. So, she calls the black activist and gives him the info to run with it.
On the final day of trial after closing arguments Brittany's mom shows up after all these years and no one knew she was black. Brit couldn't handle it and ran away. You get an update of everyone at the end of the book and it's really a powerful story of racism. Jodi is one of the best authors out there and she tackles these hard issues and makes a great book out of it.