House rules

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?

Jacob is a teen with Asperger's Syndrome (now known as an autism spectrum disorder, I believe. It's no longer a separate diagnosis.) Like many people with this disorder, he doesn't meet people's eyes in conversation and doesn't understand social cues. But his obsession is true crime, specifically forensic science. He watches reruns of the equivalent of Forensic Files every day, and often shows up at local crime scenes to try to “help” solve the case. But when a murder happens close to home, Jacob ends up as a suspect.

I believe this is meant to be a mystery but I'm not putting on my mystery shelf because it's not. It was extremely clear from the beginning what really happened, which made the 500 pages a little exhausting, just waiting for it to be “revealed.” But it is a story of family. As always, Jodi Picoult went above and beyond with her research. I may not always love the storyline, but I am ALWAYS impressed by the research she does. In this case, not only living with Asperger's, but also forensic science. It's so obvious that a ton of work and research went into this book, as usual with her books.

Something else I really loved was Jacob's brother Theo's point of view. This is written in alternating POVs, including Jacob, Theo, Jacob's mother Emma, his lawyer, Oliver, and a police detective. I enjoyed seeing the story from everyone's point of view, but especially Theo's. Theo was so realistic. He was resentful at times. He felt cheated out of his childhood and being the little brother. If you've ever taken care of a family member with a disability or even a debilitating disease, it's very relatable. I appreciated that it wasn't just rainbows and sunshine. The only thing that was a little annoying was how repetitive it was. I feel like the book could have been a couple hundred pages shorter had we not had to listen to Emma talking about his symptoms over and over and over. Like, we got it in the first hundred pages. But overall, I only discounted one star for this because I adored the realism of Theo and the research was over the top good.

Would I recommend?
Sure, why not?

I'd read My Sister's Keeper ages ago and enjoyed it well enough, so I thought I'd give Jodi Picoult another go...she has to have racked up this many bestsellers for a reason, right? But holy smokes did I hate this! So much! It feels like she took some of the key plot elements of My Sister's Keeper (same-gender siblings, one of whom has a condition that requires an extraordinary amount of parental attention, a big court case), and mashed them up with a pamphlet from Autism Speaks (an organization widely rejected among actually autistic people). The book is, at its heart, a family drama. Emma Hunt is the over-extended single mother of two teenage boys: Jacob, who has what used to be referred to as Asperger's Syndrome but is now considered low-support-needs autism, and Theo, his neurotypical younger brother. Their father, Henry, left the family before Theo's first birthday, remaining in his sons' lives only through child support checks and twice-yearly phone calls, leaving Emma without a support system and Theo without much in the way of active parental supervision as his resentment towards his brother's near-monopoly on their mother's attention curdles into some breaking-and-entering into empty homes. Jacob's special interest is forensic crime scene analysis, which he is so deeply obsessed with that he reads industry journals and uses a police scanner to arrive at crime scenes and provide suggestions to the cops. And then, one fateful day, shortly after Jacob and his social skills tutor, Jess, have an argument in public, Theo breaks into the home she is house-sitting and surprises her as she's exiting the shower. Next thing you know, Jess is found dead and Jacob winds up arrested for her murder. Emma is terrified that the things she knows from long experience are manifestations of Jacob's neurodivergence (a flat affect, an inability to correctly read social situations, a powerful reluctance to make eye contact) will be read instead as markers of his guilt, so she hires a very green young attorney to represent her son in his trial. I will try to start with something kind here. As seems to be typical, Picoult uses a rotating-narrator structure (Emma, Jacob, Theo, the lawyer, and the detective), which gives the reader a nicely-rounded set of perspectives through which to experience the story. It also helps keep the pace moving briskly. That's about all the good stuff. I had SO many issues with the plot and characterizations in this book. First of all, as someone who not only came from a family with split-up parents but also did practice some family law, there is no family court judge I can imagine who would have just let Henry completely depart his children's lives (even despite moving to the other side of the country for work). Even if Jacob could not deal with plane travel, at the very least he would have been required to have custodial time with Theo during school breaks and summers! But of course, this would mean that the scenario Picoult wanted to present of the tension between the brothers would be less compelling, so can't do that! And then there are the characters, especially Emma. On the one hand, her devotion to Jacob is written movingly, and Picoult skillfully portrays both the fierceness of the love behind that devotion with an acknowledgement of the sacrifices that it has required of her and her guilt about the the toll it's had on her relationship with her other child. On the other, she's depicted as leaning towards the “vaccines cause autism” idea that has been thoroughly debunked without any textual pushback. Her devotion to a gluten and casein-free diet and a variety of supplements for Jacob is more sympathetic, despite a lack of scientific support, as the decisions of an overwhelmed mother who desperately wants to help her child, but giving tacit support to the vaccine theory of autism is just gross! Also, we are clearly meant to understand and sympathize with the fact that she does not tell her ex-husband that Jacob has been arrested for murder until circumstances literally force her to do so! WHAT?! If a man had been portrayed as hiding a child's arrest and pending trial for killing someone from that child's mother, he would be understood as a monster! Because that is a horrible thing to hide from a child's parent! And just the cherry on the awful sundae is the third-act decision to have Emma literally run across town in the wee hours of the morning, with zero prompting, to set up a romantic subplot with Jacob's lawyer that has nothing to do with anything! We haven't even gotten into the ways I found her handling of autism generally to have significant issues! First of all, she references once or twice autism as being something that needs a “cure”, and more widely insinuates that it's akin to a disease or personality disorder. This is, from what I understand, not a perspective shared by the majority of actual autistic people. Second, Jacob is as much a stereotype as a person...instead of displaying the characteristics of autism at various levels, the way an actual human being would, we are meant to understand that he displays basically all of them, to a significant degree, all of the time. Third, she repeatedly insists through characters that are meant to be professional experts that autistic people don't have empathy or theory of mind, which is just not true. And finally, despite repeatedly claiming that Jacob is almost pathologically honest, Picoult never has anyone directly ask Jacob exactly what happened on the afternoon Jess died. The most preposterous way she does this is through the lawyer, who says he cannot ask Jacob about it for fear of compromising his ethical duty to be honest with the court. But she doesn't have Jacob's defense rest on being not guilty. Instead, his plea is not guilty by reason of insanity. Which means that he has essentially admitted that Jacob committed the crime, but that his inability to perceive right from wrong at the time of the offense precludes a finding that he is criminally responsible for his actions! So if Jacob had confessed to him that he was guilty, he would not have been precluded in presenting his defense! It makes no sense! I have more, but honestly it's not worth going into. It's just really bad.