Poppy L

Good book. More review later.

I was disappointed in this book. It felt, in the end, like a much longer novel that hadn't been completed.

I could not put this book down and shorted myself a few hours of sleep as a result. I don't honestly know why. Perhaps I just wanted to know how they were going to get themselves out of the predicament.

The next morning, though, some inconsistencies about the plot woke me up by staring me in the face and muttering at me.

- Why does the father suddenly show up? He's drawn as a character with slight Asperger's himself, which should preclude him from feeling particularly responsible for being there - at least in Picoult's book. (I'll make a note here to mention that I am not up on current knowledge of AS disorders and cannot verify most of the symptoms that Picoult has written about. However, she has written a father who might or might not have Aspergers Syndrome, but failed to choose one way or another.) It seems to me that his entire purpose in arriving for the trial is to conveniently make the mother feel guilty for sleeping with her son's lawyer.

- That said - what kind of worried and stressed parent hops into bed with the lawyer representing her ASD child in court for murder? During the case? Did someone think that women wouldn't read this book if there wasn't a romance of some sort in it?

- How come no-one bothered listening to the younger kid? Again, he tried to say something several times, but got overlooked or ignored, and again, like the above two points, it feels more like something that the author needed in order to drive the plot, not something that the characters needed.

- And finally, when a 15 year old runs away from home, why does he run to the father he's seen only a couple of times in his life? Would he even have recognized his father in the airport if his mother hadn't arrived on an earlier flight? And hey, for someone so tense about money, why didn't she just call California and ask her ex to put the boy on the next flight home instead of flying out there herself?

I bought this book for the second half - on social media and its effects on human relationships - and so skipped the section on sociable robots. Perhaps I will go back and read this section later.

I was a little hesitant after reading the introduction - Turkle is a psychoanalytically trained psychologist, and I was afraid that her writing would be focused on completely unprovable psychoanalytic theories. However, her area of expertise only comes out in her insistence that it is human relationships that create growth - and while unprovable, this is not an extreme stand.

I appreciated the discussions with teens regarding the ubiquitousness of cell phones and the changes it has caused in their lives as compared to mine at a similar age. This is the first writing I have seen that admits that etiquette has changed such that a phone call is now considered the kind of intrusion that an unannounced visit once might have been. And I am intrigued and plan to do some thinking myself on Facebook as a performance medium - are we sharing our lives with our friends, or are we performing them?

Richardson's Greywalker books are fascinating. Just enough horror to fit in “urban fantasy”, while coming down firmly on the side of spooky instead of gory. I appreciate that while her protagonist has relationships, unlike Sookie, her relationships do not dominate her personality.