I finished Jody Picoult’s The Storyteller several weeks ago, but it was such a complicated story that I had to let it marinate for awhile before writing a review. The Storyteller is about a young woman, Sage Singer, who spends her nights baking and is a recluse during the day. Sage’s face is scarred. When she attends a meeting for people who are grieving, we learn that Sage has tremendous guilt because she was driving an automobile and had an accident in which her mother was killed. At the grief meeting Sage meets an elderly man, Joseph Weber, who was attending the meetings because his wife recently died. Sage learns that Joseph is a soft-spoken well-liked member of the community. They soon become friends. Joseph asks Sage to do a favor for him, to kill him. At first she says no, but after he tells her his story of being an S.S. officer during the holocaust, and when she learns that he was at the same concentration camp that her grandmother survived will she re-think her decision? Woven throughout The Storyteller is another story, written by Sage’s grandmother during her years in the death camps. Her grandmother’s ability to spin the riveting tale ends up being her salvation in the camps. Her brutal descriptions of the holocaust are sometimes hard to read, but Jodi Picoult’s shocking ending to The Storyteller will have the reader contemplating forgiveness and salvation long after they turn the last page. Reviewed by Becky G.