Picoult is my go-to airplane-read author, but this was my least favorite of her books. It didn't zip along like her others, which is okay; I don't think she meant it to. But it also didn't feel authentic, and given her grand ambition with this book (American racism), that's not okay. Without spoiling anything, here are my plot quibbles: 
 * Any nurse will tell you that CPR done properly can crack ribs, so bruised ribs aren't uncommon. 
 * If Ruth 's goal was to have a platform to say her piece, she had one of the country's most well-known TV personalities begging for an interview. 
 So the plot wasn't 100% solid for me. Separately, and I guess this is the Book Discussion Question: 
 While authors often write as other characters - different races, genders, nationalities - this time I found it jarring. I felt this way because the black main character tells the white main character that she couldn't truly understand what it was like to be black. Okay, that's understandable, but if we zoom out we see that a white author is putting these words in the black character's mouth, which are then interpreted (a bit simply imho) by the white character. Not that the words aren't true, but the result was I felt pulled out of the story -- and more inclined to question the novel's authenticity than to appreciate its prose.