Second Glance

About Second Glance

When a developer puts a piece of land in Comtosook, Vermont up for sale, the local Abenaki tribe protests—insisting the property is a burial ground. Strange events follow: lights appear in the trees, electrical equipment fails, animals behave inexplicably. The developer hires Ross Wakeman, a ghost hunter, to investigate and reassure the community. Ross is not exactly a neutral investigator. He has been walking into dangerous situations for years, half-hoping one of them kills him, since the woman he loved died six years ago. What he finds in Comtosook is more complicated than haunting.

Published by Simon & Schuster in 2003, Second Glance has an unusually wide scope for a Picoult novel. The supernatural plot is braided with a historical storyline set in 1930s Vermont—a period when Vermont operated an active eugenics program that targeted Abenaki people, the poor, and anyone state officials classified as unfit. The historical material is not fabricated; Vermont's Program for the Control of Hereditary Defects was real, and the novel draws on its documented record.

The love story at the novel's center moves across decades and into territory that raises questions about what love is, what it survives, and what it costs to hold onto grief rather than release it.

Ghosts, History, and What We Bury

The novel's deepest structural argument is that the past is not past—that history, particularly the kind of official history that buries what was done to specific communities, has ongoing presence. The Abenaki characters in the novel are not simply aggrieved stakeholders; they are people whose community was actively targeted by state-sanctioned eugenics within living memory, and the novel takes that history seriously as history.

Ross's suicidal ideation—he is a man who has stopped protecting himself—is handled with directness. His arc requires that his relationship to his own grief change, and Picoult doesn't shortcut that change. The supernatural elements of the plot intersect with his psychology in ways that feel earned rather than convenient.

Why Second Glance Has Been Challenged

Second Glance has been challenged in 2 states and 4 districts tracked in this catalog. Challenges cite the supernatural content, language, and the novel's treatment of suicide and suicidal ideation. The historical material about eugenics—a factual chapter of Vermont history—is occasionally noted as well. A novel that tells the truth about what the state did to vulnerable people in the twentieth century is exactly the kind of book that belongs in libraries. That truth is uncomfortable precisely because it is true.