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Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Picoult-a-thon: Before I Begin
As mentioned in my first post, Katie and I are doing a co-project (because "joint project" just sounds wrong) where we will be reading through Jodi Picoult's new book, House Rules, and doing a Very Special Kind Of Review Which May Include Snarking (or may not. It could be an awesome book. Sometimes they are. Nineteen Minutes, I am looking at you.). Why this book? Well, it's almost kind of an inside joke between Katie and myself, but not quite: Picoult is an author with whom we each have a kind of love/loathe relationship (I could be wrong but I think on my part it's more love than loathe, and on Katie's it's more the reverse), and one day not long ago we were chatting about how we should read Picoult's next book together and blog about our predictions for the obligatory Twist Ending (if you've ever read Picoult, you know that every ending must twist; it's the first law of Picoultdynamics). So here I am, and there she is or will be, and I'm out of parentheses at present so I had better get down to business.
I haven't started the book yet. It's 532 pages and Katie and I are going to try to read it in a week even though I have school and children and all kinds of other fun things that fill my days (verifying trigonometric identities makes my brain smile but it does cut into one's reading time -- oops, now I have a parenthesis deficit). So unless my calculator is wrong, that comes out to exactly 76 pages per day. It's as if the publisher knew we would do this, right? I will make a possibly heroic effort to keep up.
The jacket blurb tells me that this is a book about a mother of two sons: Jacob, who has Aspergers and is SERIOUSLY into crime-scene analysis, and Theo, who, reading between the lines, been completely neglected and shunted to the side by his single mother in favor of his older brother's issues. Somebody kills somebody, and some people think that the older crime-obsessed son with Aspergers did it. (There are better summaries just about everywhere, possibly including the wall of a stall in your nearest gas station restroom, but that'll do for now because have you seen the timestamp on this post? -- GAH. More parenthesis debt.)
Without further ado, my first prediction re: the twist ending, based on my not-insubstantial experience with Picoult's previous works: We will be set up to believe that Jacob is innocent and that his brother Theo is the killer, but in fact Jacob will be GUILTY. (Don't worry, that's absolutely not a spoiler. It'll probably change at least once or twice before I totally spoil the end for you.) (GAH!)
