« springing | Main | Picoult-a-thon: Day 3, to page 228 »
Friday, March 05, 2010
Picoult-a-thon: Day 2, pages 76ish-152
In case you're looking at this post with furrowed brow, thinking, "the heck?!", I'll recap: Katie and I are blogging about a new book (House Rules) by an author we both like/loathe (Jodi Picoult). Here's the first explanatory post in the series.
* * * * * *
Ooh, so many possibilities are emerging now. To summarize, we know that Jess is dead; we know that Theo saw her right before she disappeared; we know that Jacob came home from an appointment with her in serious distress; we know that he moved her body and set it up so that the police would find it a few days later; we know that the cops suspect Jess's jerk of a boyfriend. Picoult is setting it up, though, like Jess fell and Jacob cleaned up and moved her body, perhaps (as Katie mentioned) thinking that he's "taking care of his brother" (House Rule number 5) by covering up for him. It also appears that Jacob's forensics obsession is at play here; has he set the scene up as a test for the local PD? It begins to look that way. This all still plays into my original PPCSTE prediction: we're supposed to think Jacob is innocent, but he did it. But could she be trying to make us think that? It's a very Vizzini vs. Westley kind of circle of doubt I've got going here.
Complaints:
- I hate to nitpick, but neurotransmitters don't transmit by "raging through [one's] bloodstream", Ms. Picoult. They're made in neurons, and then they hang out between neurons waiting to, you know, transmit impulses. Maybe he has agonists in his bloodstream. Cripes, I'm such a nerd.
- Also, after all my ranting about how writers shouldn't show us the chickens in my last Picoult post, I really think in a crime/mystery/whatevergenrethisis novel, it's extremely unfair to have the protagonist and the narrator hide pertinent information from us. That is Not Playing By The Rules. Jacob and his mysterious metal "object" from the crime scene alllllmost made me throw the book, but not quite. I did give in and roll my eyes a few times. I'm going to add a feature where I guess the nature of the "object" until it's revealed, though. I think we're supposed to think it's a knife, so that's too easy (again with the Vizzini vs. Westley scene), so I'm thinking it's Jess's iPod.
Otherwise, good reading. Better than the first 76ish pages, I think.
Just to clarify, my take on the Picoult-Patented Cheap-Shot Twist Ending at this point is:
It looks like Jess fell and Jacob moved her body. The fact that this is so cut-and-dried so early on in the game makes me distrust it, and I hold to my original prediction, which is that Jacob killed her, for some reason having to do with taking care of his brother.
