Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shine | 2016 | Jodi Picoult | Buy |
| 2 | Små Stora Saker | 2016 | Jodi Picoult | N/A |
| 3 | Small Great Things | 2016 | Jodi Picoult | Buy |
The Ruth Jefferson series centers on the novel Small Great Things (2016), one of Picoult’s most widely discussed books. Shine (2016) is a short prequel set in 1979 that follows eight-year-old Ruth Brooks as a scholarship student at the Dalton School, where she begins to notice racial lines her white classmates do not see. The story introduces the gap between Ruth’s world and the privileged world she enters through education.
Small Great Things picks up decades later, when Ruth is an experienced labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital. After a white supremacist couple demands that Ruth not touch their newborn son, and the baby later dies during a medical emergency, Ruth is arrested and charged with murder. The novel tells the story from three perspectives: Ruth, the baby’s father, and the public defender assigned to Ruth’s case. Picoult has said the book was partly inspired by a real incident and by her own reckoning with questions about race and privilege.